Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[1] The lepton and baryon asymmetries affect the much better understood Big Bang nucleosynthesis at later times, during which light atomic nuclei began to form. Successful synthesis of the light elements requires that there be an imbalance in the number of baryons and antibaryons to one part in a billion when the universe is a few minutes old. [2]
In physical cosmology, the baryon asymmetry problem, also known as the matter asymmetry problem or the matter–antimatter asymmetry problem, [1] [2] is the observed imbalance in baryonic matter (the type of matter experienced in everyday life) and antibaryonic matter in the observable universe.
The local geometry of the universe is determined by whether the relative density Ω is less than, equal to or greater than 1. From top to bottom: a spherical universe with greater than critical density (Ω>1, k>0); a hyperbolic, underdense universe (Ω<1, k<0); and a flat universe with exactly the critical density (Ω=1, k=0).
All the particles that make up the matter around us, such electrons and protons, have antimatter versions which are nearly identical, but with mirrored properties such as the opposite electric charge.
This imbalance has to be exceptionally small, on the order of 1 in every 1 630 000 000 (≈ 2 × 10 9) particles a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang. [6] After most of the matter and antimatter was annihilated, what remained was all the baryonic matter in the current universe, along with a much greater number of bosons .
What is the 3-manifold of comoving space, i.e. of a comoving spatial section of the universe, informally called the "shape" of the universe? Neither the curvature nor the topology is presently known, though the curvature is known to be "close" to zero on observable scales.
In November 2010, the ALPHA collaboration announced that they had trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, [23] the first confinement of neutral antimatter. In June 2011, they trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms, up to 3 simultaneously, for up to 1,000 seconds. [24] They then studied its hyperfine structure, gravity effects, and charge.
Experimental evidence indicates that our galaxy is made of matter; however, scientists believe there are about 100–200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe and some versions of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe require equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Theories that explain this apparent asymmetry violate other ...