Scientists learned something crazy about antimatter this morning.
What does anti matter look like.
Cern experiment makes spectroscopic measurement of antihydrogen.
Antimatter should have annihilated all of the matter in the universe after the big bang.
Anti water for example would still be h2o and would have the same properties of water when reacting with other antimatter.
In modern physics antimatter is defined as matter which is composed of the antiparticles or partners of the corresponding particles of ordinary matter.
But okay what does that even mean.
So in principle none of us should exist.
Then i show you what happens i.
Minuscule numbers of antiparticles are generated daily at particle accelerators total production has been only a few nanograms and in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay but only a.
Experimentally there is no difference between the spectral lines of antihydrogen and of ordinary hydrogen.
When matter and antimatter meet they annihilate leaving nothing but energy behind.
Anti matter will combine with normal.
Experiments at cern have proved that the optical spectrum of antihydrogen is identical to that of matter hydrogen.
What would an antimatter universe look like.
Antimatter looks exactly like oridnary matter as long as it does not enterin touch with matter as then it explodes in a spectacular annihilation.
It turns out as far as we can tell it looks like an exact mirror image of regular matter.
Theoretically anti matter should look just like normal matter.
According to theory the big bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts.
Real antimatter looks just like regular matter.
A proton has a positive charge while an antiproton a negative.
When you see antimatter depicted in science fiction movies it s usually some weird glowing gas in a special containment unit.