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Hmm, so there is this thing where physical theories seem to predict that each piece of matter should be complemented with an according piece of anti-matter (bec
by pflanze 11y ago
Hmm, so there is this thing where physical theories seem to predict that each piece of matter should be complemented with an according piece of anti-matter (because those then make themselves "whole" by turning into pure energy), but we don't know where the anti-matter is. Your description made me think, could it all be in black holes?
- Natanael_L 11y agoAntimatter is still regular matter, but with the exact opposite charge to the common particles we keep seeing. So technically yes, it could all have disappeared into black holes, but it wouldn't really be antimatter anymore after entering the singularity due to being effectively broken down into pure energy/matter.
- danbruc 11y agoI don't think many - if any - physicist believe that there is a real singularity within a black hole. The existence of singularities in the solutions of our equations more likely just tells us that the equations are just good approximations that break down at the center of black holes.
- lisivka 11y agoWhat will happen when black hole will merge with antimatter black hole of same mass?
- Natanael_L 11y agoIt is no longer antimatter after entering the black hole (edit: once reaching the presumed singularity, but either way you still won't see any difference from the outside). The mass is the same, only the charge is different. They'd merge normally. You might be thinking of negative matter, in which case they'd effectively cancel out, erase each other.
- danbruc 11y agoNothing strange happens when something falls into a black hole. We could right now be beyond the event horizon of a newly forming black hole. Unless a black hole is particularly small, in which case there will be notable tidal forces near the event horizon, the event horizon of a black hole is a pretty ordinary place hardly distinguishable from flat space. So nothing happens to matter or antimatter when it falls into a black hole.
- raattgift 11y agoYou're essentially right on the "no drama" conjecture. However, once through the horizon you switch from the exterior to the interior solution to the EFEs, and find yourself inevitably and very quickly (in proper time) colliding with the singularity or whatever is at the centre of a black hole. You will notice very quickly (seconds to minutes by your wristwatch) that you are inside the event horizon of even a 10^10 M_sun SMBH. That's one reason we can confidently predict we are not inside a black hole with a radius of approximately the Hubble length; we can't use an interior black hole metric to describe our patch of spacetime. If anything, because of the early hot dense universe, we look a bit more like a time-reversal of a interior black hole solution, but even that falls to pieces on inspection. Additionally, unless you believe that the universe is really really different a light year outside the Hubble volume, we also can't use an exterior black hole solution to describe that. (And if you decided for the sake of argument that physics just outside the observable universe is very different, the "outside" metric would still see an expanding surface, which is very not-blackhole-like. The "outside" observers should also be able to infer the spatial flatness of our observable universe; space is decidedly not flat inside a black hole, otherwise we wouldn't have the problem of the infinite density at the singularity.) Unfortunately GR and QFT make different and conflicting predictions about what happens to a positron and electron tossed into a black hole once they reach the region where curvature is on the scale of their Compton length.
- danbruc 11y agoSome of the points you made I was aware of but not precise enough in my comments, of others I wasn't aware and that are great pointers for what I should look into in the future. Thanks a lot for the effort you put into your replies.
- danbruc 11y agoIt sounds a bit like you think there should be one antimatter particle for each matter particle in the universe and we don't know where all the antimatter is but that is not the case. There is just a lot more matter than antimatter in the (observable) universe and we have no good explanation how this came to be because there is no obvious asymmetry in the equations and one would then naturally expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe. So we don't know why we see so little antimatter, but we don't really think that it exists and is hiding somewhere, we think it never came into existence. And that is a good thing, otherwise all matter could just have turned into radiation and we couldn't exist.