What makes antimatter unique is that when antimatter comes in contact with its regular matter counterpart, they mutually destroy each other and all of their mass is converted to energy. For every particle that exists, there is an antimatter counterpart (some particles such as photons are their own anti-particles). Also, antimatter is gravitationally attracted to other forms of matter just like regular matter. For starters, antimatter has regular mass and accelerates in response to forces just like regular matter. Antimatter is not as exotic as science fiction makes it out to be. They both have the same mass, but have opposite electric charge. For example, the antimatter version of an electron is a positron. Although the names sound vague and almost fictional, the types of matter called antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and degenerate matter are all different, specific entities that really exist in our universe.Īntimatter is just regular matter with a few properties flipped, such as the electric charge. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University). Jee (University of California, Davis), and A.

Public Domain Image, source: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. The dark matter left behind is colored blue and is determined by gravitational lensing measurements. The hot gas from the collision is colored green. The starlight is colored white and orange, showing the location of the galaxies. Now we know something about how gravity effects the motion of objects.Composite astronomical image of dark matter being left behind after a collision of galaxies (Cluster Abell 520). To learn more about how General Relativity can help predict the fate of the Universe watch this video created by students film makers in the UCL Physics and Astronomy department. That is why they are black, any light that falls in the gravity well never has enough speed to escape and is trapped forever. Well even light, the fastest thing we know of, isn’t fast enough to escape the gravity well of these objects known as Black Holes. So what happens when you get a really heavy mass, something small and dense like a cannonball modeling a collapsed star, many times the mass of our Sun. To get out of the gravity well the marble will need more speed, and this is known as the escape velocity. The more mass the central object has the steeper the slump in the fabric will be, this is known as a gravity well.

What happens to the path of the marble as you change the speed you roll it at? You might be able to predict what would happen if you made the central object more massive. Scientists call this a model, something that physicist like to do to make a complex concept simpler, in this case, a planet orbiting a star, or the Moon orbiting the Earth. If you had no friction slowing the marble down you can imagine the marble constantly orbiting the central mass. The path of the marble will bend, if it has just the right amount of speed you can get the marble to do a complete loop, otherwise known as an orbit. With something massive (literally lots of mass) like a watermelon in the middle try rolling a marble across the fabric. You can experiment with this yourself with some fabric, a few family members to keep the cloth tight, and some spherical objects of different mass. The more massive the central object the more it will bend the net, and the greater the force that will be exerted upon the surroundings. Any object on the net will roll downhill towards the centre of mass. Think of a net with a heavy object in the middle. General Relativity tells us that space-time is curved by mass and the more massive the object the more space-time is curved. In the 17th Century, Newton and his Laws of Motion may have been able to tell us how fast an apple will fall from a tree, but it tells us nothing about how gravity works. That would have to wait until another physicist, Albert Einstein, with a creative way of thinking about the Universe and the Theory of General Relativity, published to the world in 1915. It pulls galaxies together, keeps planets orbiting stars, and pulls apples to Earth.

Antimatter star