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NASA collecting anti-matter with giant ballon
Doofus writes " It almost sounds like a science-fiction movie: NASA launched a 60-story-high balloon to the upper fringes of Earth's atmosphere to collect precious particles of some of the rarest
stuff in the Universe -- antimatter -- and, just possibly, evidence that entire anti-galaxies exist.
The
press release is online. " Check out more coverage as well.
This is not true. Antiprotons have been found, yes, as have positrons, but they are entirely consistent with having been produced in secondary reactions with the interstellar medium - i.e., a very high energy cosmic ray proton interacts with a stray hydrogen atom and produces a whole bunch of crap, some of which decays into an antiproton, which then propagates to Earth. We have actually found very few antiprotons in cosmic rays. In addition, there are other reasons why antimatter galaxies either do not exist, or are separated from matter galaxies on an immensely huge scale. If antimatter galaxies did exist, we would have regions of intermixing of matter and antimatter which produce gamma rays. We don't see a high diffuse gamma ray flux, therefore, the intermixing regions don't exist. Hence, antimatter galaxies either don't exist, or are separated from normal matter galaxies on an immense scale. Currently, we don't know of any way in which they could have been separated on such a huge scale during the Big Bang, so the current thought is, there are no antimatter galaxies.
I wonder what those people who whine about the nuclear-powered Cassini space craft would say if they understood the implications of collecting antimatter: when antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates, creating two gamma rays (gamma rays != good).
Luckily for the human race, we currently only have to ability to create and maintain minute amounts of the stuff. Someday, however, I'm sure we'll have anti-anti-matter protestors. Won't that be fun?
Wow, that is like deep and freaky man, but like, dude, I got something even more out there.
Like, imagine this dude who lives in the mirror right. What he would call right, would be what I call left, and what he would call left, would be what I call right.
Deep shit...