SPACE.com: Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found

[EnumaElish]

SPACE.com: "Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found"

Antimatter, which annihilates matter upon contact, seems to be rare in the universe. Still, for decades, scientists had clues that a vast cloud of antimatter lurked in space, but they did not know where it came from.

The mysterious source of this antimatter has now been discovered — stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes.

[...]

"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," said researcher Georg Weidenspointner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.


[...]

Weidenspointner, Skinner and their colleagues, detailed their findings in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080111/sc_space/sourceofmysteriousantimatterfound

 

[rewebster]

It would be interesting if they recorded something (like a star) flying through that 'cloud'.

 

[EnumaElish]

It would be interesting if they recorded something (like a star) flying through that 'cloud'.

Whoa... I am thinking, "gamma ray bursts."

Does anyone think that matter-antimatter collusions could explain GRBs?

 

[rewebster]

according to the article, gamma rays, at least---

From the article:

"These gamma rays apparently came from a cloud of antimatter roughly 10,000 light-years across surrounding our galaxy's core."

The key word may be "apparently".

 

[EnumaElish]

The article references "a type of gamma rays" generated by matter-antimatter collusion/

So there is a type that is generated by such collusions, and other types that aren't?

I posted this as a question under Cosmology yesterday; no responses so far.

 

[rewebster]

"Gamma rays are very energetic photons, with energies between 1 MeV - 10 GeV."

and

"EGRET, the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope, detects gamma rays in the energy range 20 MeV - 30 GeV. "

"In its first few years of operation, the EGRET instrument completed an entire sky survey, which detected 128 sources. Some of these objects have been identified with known sources. The LMC is the only 'normal' galaxy detected by EGRET. However, 50 EGRET sources have been identified as active galactic nuclei (AGN). "

http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/research/projects/SPIGOT//gamma.html

It seems like quite a range, so I would think that they may be talking about something even more specific---but I'm not a particle/astro physicist.

__________________

I don't if it is/was a typo--but, in the first line (of this post) is states that Gamma rays are in the "1 MeV - 10 GeV" and the second "detects gamma rays in the energy range 20 MeV - 30 GeV "---the two statements don't match in the same range.