![]() Intrigued by the possibility that some of the universe’s antimatter may have survived in the form of stars, a team of researchers examined 10 years of observations from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. If those observations are confirmed, such stray antimatter could have been shed by antistars. But an instrument on the International Space Station recently cast doubt on this assumption by detecting hints of a few antihelium nuclei. Physicists typically think that as the universe evolved, some process led to matter particles vastly outnumbering their antimatter alter egos ( SN: 11/25/19). It’s generally thought that although the universe was born with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, the modern universe contains almost no antimatter ( SN: 3/24/20). It “would really imply a significant change in our understanding of what happened in the early universe.” “If, by any chance, one can prove the existence of the antistars … that would be a major blow for the standard cosmological model,” says Pierre Salati, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Annecy-le-Vieux Laboratory of Theoretical Physics in France not involved in the work. This could happen on the surfaces of antistars as their gravity draws in normal matter from interstellar space, researchers report online April 20 in Physical Review D. These antistar candidates seem to give off the kind of gamma rays that are produced when antimatter - matter’s oppositely charged counterpart - meets normal matter and annihilates. Fourteen pinpricks of light on a gamma-ray map of the sky could fit the bill for antistars, stars made of antimatter, a new study suggests.
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