Post by John Marston on Apr 15, 2021 13:35:12 GMT
Matter vs Antimatter
What is the greatest war ever known to humanity? Is it World War 1? or the second one? Maybe the cold war or some other one. But, what if I told you that the greatest war ever, was not between humans, was before humans, earth, solar system, milky way galaxy, atoms and even before subatomic particles formed!
The war was between Matter and Antimatter. What is matter? Matter is nothing but those which occupy space and volume. Everything present around you is matter. Even you are made up of matter. Antimatter is a totally different thing. It is just diametrically opposite to matter. As I have already explained before, antimatter is like -1 and matter is 1. If we add -1 and +1, we get 0. It is the same in this case, except that it releases a huge amount of energy.
This image explains the difference between Matter and Antimatter, except that even their spins are opposite.
Matter is made of Protons, Neutrons and Electrons but Antimatter is made of Positrons, Antiproton and Antineutron. Also, remember that these particles spin in the opposite directions. How much energy is released exactly in these reactions? Well, if 1 kg of matter reacts with 1kg of antimatter, it will result in the production of energy of about 17200 Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Phew! that is a lot of energy.
Now coming to the war, Matter vs Antimatter, it happened immediately after the Quark Epoch. This phase is known as the Hadron Epoch. It is said that there are equal amounts of matter and antimatter during the formation of the universe. Then why is matter dominating the universe? Here comes the baryon asymmetry or the matter-antimatter asymmetry. This states that due to the previous phases during the formation of the Universe (Plank Epoch, Grand Unification Epoch, Electroweak and Quark Epochs), it seems that a slight misbalance between matter and antimatter happened. Now during the hadron epoch, the matter and antimatter collided and kept on annihilating each other.
Imagine 17200 Nagasaki nuclear bombs blasting in every direction possible around you continuously, releasing large amounts of energy! That was happening exactly between 10^-12 to 10^-5 seconds after the big bang. Exactly how much misbalance is given by the figure 50 in 100 crore or 1 billion. That is what exactly known as the baryon asymmetry.
Now you might think that this figure is very less, but that was sufficient to create the universe. And then, 20 minutes after the big bang, the universe was not hot enough to enable nuclear fusion. The Early universe was filled with radiation, but after about 47,000 years, it became matter dominated and then after about 1,00,000 years, the first molecule helium hydride is formed and after 3,70,000 years, neutral atoms formed and the universe became transparent. Until this time, the universe was opaque.
Between about 10 and 17 million years the universe's average temperature was suitable for liquid water 273–373 K (0–100 °C) and there has been speculation whether rocky planets or indeed life could have arisen briefly, since a tiny part of the universe could have had different conditions from the rest.
At some point around 200 to 500 million years, the earliest generations of stars and galaxies form (exact timings are still being researched), and early large structures gradually emerge, drawn to the foam-like dark matter filaments which have already begun to draw together throughout the universe. The earliest generations of stars have not yet been observed astronomically. They may have been huge (100-300 solar masses) and non-metallic, with very short lifetimes compared to most stars we see today so they commonly finish burning their hydrogen fuel and explode.
The Universe has remained the same from 1 billion years to 12.8 billion years and will be so for many billions of years into the future. Uncertainties in the current knowledge means that we cannot predict the future after a hundred or so billion years.
