Origin of Anti-matter discovered

This is just fascinating stuff. I can’t say I understand all of it, but I love pondering that vastness and the true, mysterious “cloud of unknowing” that only emphasizes that for all we know…we don’t know anything.

The puzzle of where the mysterious antimatter at the heart of our galaxy comes from has finally been solved, according to a top Italian space expert.

Giovanni Fabrizio Bignami, head of the Italian Space Agency…said the cloud of antimatter at the centre of the Milky Way, which scientists have known about for 30 years, appears to derive from ‘binary’ star systems distributed in the same area.

Binary star systems are ones in which a normal star is gradually being sucked towards a black hole or a neutron star. Neutron stars are stars that have collapsed under their own gravity and become incredibly dense.

”We have taken a big step forwards in understanding the antimatter at the centre of our galaxy,” he said, noting that the findings were the result of four years of data supplied by the European Space Agency’s satellite Integral.

”We used to think that the source of the anti-matter was a single point, like a black hole,” Bignami said.

The existence of antimatter was deduced by British physicist Paul Dirac in the 1920s. Later scientists managed to create it in laboratories. Then astronomers found a mysterious cloud of it at the centre of the Milky Way.

Because Dirac’s theory is that matter and antimatter are produced in equal amounts from energy, a question that intrigues many is whether other places exist in the universe which are almost entirely antimatter.