solar wind; comet Shoemaker-Levy 9; space probes sent into Jupiter, Titan; probes sampling volcanic gas from Io, & a Saturn moon; the Io sodium doughnut; heliopause. We have Lunar & Martian meteorites on Earth. There's a constant rain of tiny stuff on every planet. Unless everything in the solar system is plain matter, that rain should get a lot more exciting when opposites collide. Would we expect to see a collision of a small anti-matter meteorite with Mars atmosphere? Rich ------ Quoting Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>:
Tabloid journalism? We hope not -- this research is what prompted my question in the first place.
But even if it is true, there should still be a lot of antimatter around in pockets of the universe, unless antimatter has some other defect -- e.g., perhaps it decays faster than matter?
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In "empty" space, one could conceivably "store" antimatter by having a ball of (neutral) matter in orbit around a ball of (neutral) antimatter of similar order-of-magnitude mass. I was wondering what the diameter of the orbit should be in order to keep the configuration from blowing up in a reasonable time scale. I'm guessing that an Earth-sized mass of matter could have a Moon-sized mass of antimatter in more-or-less circular orbit for quite a long time (mucho millions of years) -- even while giving off huge amounts of x-rays & neutrinos.
Of course, we already know that the Moon, Mars, Venus & a few other bodies aren't made of antimatter, because we landed various objects on them. But what makes us so positive that all the other bodies in the Solar System are made of normal matter?
At 01:13 PM 7/2/2010, Bill Gosper wrote:
Is this just tabloid journalism? http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1139 --rwg
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com <http://gosper.org/webmail/src/compose.php?send_to=hbaker1%40pipeline.com>> wrote:> "How do we know whether something we're looking at in a telescope is matter or anti-matter?"
I think the main answer is that space isn't empty, and if there were a boundary between matter and antimatter anywhere we would see all the gamma rays coming from the annihilations at the boundary.
There aren't many other asymmetries!
--Josh
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