Milky Way Has Mysterious Lopsided Cloud Of Antimatter: Clue To Origin Of Antimatter

The shape of the mysterious cloud of antimatter in the central regions of the Milky Way has been revealed by ESA’s orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral. The unexpectedly lopsided shape is a new clue to the origin of the antimatter. The observations have significantly decreased the chances that the antimatter is coming from the annihilation or decay of astronomical dark matter.

Georg Weidenspointner at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and an international team of astronomers made the discovery using four-years-worth of data from Integral. The cloud shows up because of the gamma rays it emits when individual particles of antimatter, in this case positrons, encounter electrons, their normal matter counterpart, and annihilate one another. One signature of positron-electron annihilation is gamma rays carrying 511 thousand electron-volts (keV) of energy. There has been a vigorous debate about the origin of these positrons ever since the discovery of the 511 keV emission from the centre of the galaxy by gamma-ray detectors flown on balloons during the 1970s. TO KNOW MORE:-http://redonfiles.blogspot.com/2011/06/milky-way-has-mysterious-lopsided-cloud.html