Here’s something you won’t read every day: It’s possible, researchers report, that fourteen stars consist of antimatter:
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. 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.
“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. It “would really imply a significant change in our understanding of what happened in the early universe.”
Maria Temming, “Stars made of antimatter could lurk in the Milky Way” at ScienceNews
The universe is believed to have started with equal amounts of matter and antimatter but just what happened to almost all of the latter is not currently known. In theory, as the vid below says, the universe shouldn’t exist.
Before we worry too much about the fate of the Standard Model of the universe, it’s worth noting that we are also told that it would be “extremely difficult” to prove that a star is really an anti-star. It’s mainly just an intriguing idea at this point.
The paper is open access.