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Why is there a Universe, and why is it filled with matter, and not equal amounts of matter and antimatter? The last question is a puzzle that has gainfully occupied the minds of and employed physicists for many years. The time spent pondering such questions has not been wasted, as it turns out, as researchers from the Large Hadron Collider b detector report that one of the theoretical paths that allows matter to outnumber antimatter is open for business....Researchers at the LHCb have shown that baryons (along with mesons) also violate Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry, thus making it statistically possible for more matter to be created than antimatter.
(Caveat: Dataset currently provides "only" a 3.3 sigma confidence level.)
The full article, Measurement of matter–antimatter differences in beauty baryon decays which appears in the journal Nature Physics is available at: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
Other coverage:
Ars Technica
phys.org
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @05:37AM
For all we know (as I understand it) we could be the lone matter bubble in an anti-matter universe.
Because space isn't empty. The exo-galactic space in our local supercluster is filled with dust coming from each galaxy, if any one was made of anti-matter, then it's boundary space between it and the galaxies made of matter will emit a lot of gama radiation.
If there are any galaxies made out of anti-matter out there, they are far beyond the reach of our instruments.
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Friday February 03 2017, @10:23AM
I was about to say the same as the AC above.
For a long time I wondered myself how do we know that the stuff outside earth are matter or anti-matter, and it boils down to the interface, if an asteroid, planet, solar system or galaxy were to be made of anti-matter, the gases and dust they emit would annihilate with the gas or dust emitted by the other stuff made of matter nearby and we would see a big area emitting huge amounts of gamma rays, and we don't see it, not even around the most distant starts visible, so this probably means that if there was anti-matter created with the big bang, it was in lower quantities than regular matter and was annihilated pretty quickly.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 03 2017, @07:37PM
Well, that's not clear. There are other alternatives to unequal amounts being created, it's just that they depend on mechanisms that we don't have good reason to believe existed. For Example:
We don't see the entire universe, over half (how much over we can't guess) is probably invisible because it's outside out light-cone. So if at the time of creation for some reason matter was "emitted" in one direction and anti-matter in the opposite, we'd never see a region of gamma emission, because it would be outside our light cone.
My favorite speculation along these lines has the big bang exploding two ways through time, so the anti-matter was moving backwards through time relative to our perceived direction of time. I don't know of any way to check this, but a positron appears to be identical to an electron moving backwards in time, and I believe the same is true of a proton and an anti-proton. And of course light doesn't move through time at all, because anything that's moving at the speed of light has time frozen. There might still be ways to disprove this, but I haven't heard of any, any more than I've heard of ways to prove it.
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