
“Cosmic String” Gravitational Waves Could Solve Antimatter Mystery - tazedsoul
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-string-gravitational-waves-could-solve-antimatter-mystery/
======
z3t4
It feels weird that there where nothing, then something exploded, and now I
sit here on a rock, thinking about it.

~~~
foobar1962
I just read that in Kermit's voice. (Morgan Freeman was having a RDO.)

~~~
oso2k
For those not on 9/80... RDO=Regular Day Off.

------
_0ffh
Can any physicist tell me if there is even necessarily a mystery involved? If
matter and antimatter are made from the same building blocks, couldn't a
prevalence of one over the other be down to chance?

~~~
hnews_account_1
If they're from the same building blocks, chance puts it at 50-50. What we see
is way skewed obviously since we exist and can observe galaxies and galaxies
worth of matter.

~~~
dogma1138
While we can assume that our galaxy is made out of matter the same cannot be
said about galaxies further away.

If matter and antimatter split into clusters it’s possible that some galactic
clusters formed out of anti matter and some out of matter.

This for a time was the prevailing theory however for the most part we assume
now that the universe is indeed made out of matter because we do not see
annihilation events throughout the observable timeline of the observable
universe.

Also if matter and antimatter are still at 1:1 ratios one would expect to
detect annihilation events across the galactic void since space between
galaxies isn’t completely empty and the current temperatures are too cold for
annihilation to occur at any rate that would indicate that symmetry wasn’t
broken during the early universe.

------
grawprog
>But Dror and his team, through theoretical models and calculations, figured
out a way we might be able to see this phase transition. They proposed that
the change would have created extremely long and extremely thin threads of
energy called “cosmic strings” that still pervade the universe.

Why does this remind me of

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories)

And

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism)

If there's one thing i've noticed about history and scientific discoveries,
whenever we invent things that should exist to fill models we're usually not
correct.

~~~
Zanni
Good question. Why does it remind you of the aether and humors and not, say,
the positron [1] and quarks? [2]

Sometimes experiment leads theory, but sometimes theory leads experiment. It's
only when theory proceeds untethered to any possible experimental confirmation
or rejection that it gets in trouble. In this case, they're making actual
predictions that should be testable in the near future.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron)
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark)

