What is the connection between antimatter and dark matter?

[pibb]

is antimatter the same thing as dark matter? is antigravity the same thing as dark energy?

 

[JaredJames]

Anti-matter isn't dark matter.

There is no such thing as anti-gravity.

Anti-matter is subject to gravity just like regular matter. It also has mass, not anti-mass.

You may want to read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

 

[Drakkith]

Like Jared said, anti-matter is just like normal matter except it has opposite charge. And dark energy is not anti gravity. There is no such thing in the view of mainsteam physics.

Btw Jared, I love your sig.

 

[pibb]

thank you for the very quick replies. =]
i was wondering how many more categories(?) of matter are there? all the matter we can detect with our senses, antimatter, and also dark matter? are there anymore known to science that i am not aware of?

 

[JaredJames]

Btw Jared, I love your sig.

I know, great ain't it.

Still laugh when I read it. You can thank Mr Archosaur for it.

 

[Drakkith]

thank you for the very quick replies. =]
i was wondering how many more categories(?) of matter are there? all the matter we can detect with our senses, antimatter, and also dark matter? are there anymore known to science that i am not aware of?

Currently the only "types" of matter we have actually observed are normal matter and anti-matter. We have reasons for thinking there is something called dark matter, but we havn't been able to verify that yet.

 

[pibb]

were any of these "types" of matter already around before the big bang? or was it only afterward that we think they formed?

 

[Drakkith]

were any of these "types" of matter already around before the big bang? or was it only afterward that we think they formed?

For that I think you need to look up the Big Bang on wikipedia or something. It's kind of a complicated issue.

 

[pibb]

i couldn't find anything that mentions what might have happened before the big bang.
i was wondering if it was some sort of super collision.

 

[Drakkith]

i couldn't find anything that mentions what might have happened before the big bang.
i was wondering if it was some sort of super collision.

My personal view on it, was that the big bang might have been preceded by a big crunch of the"previous universe" if you will. Unfortunently the evidence of accelerating expansion doesn't support that. So who knows.

 

[FtlIsAwesome]

Negative mass, also called exotic matter, would have repulsive gravity. Though we have yet to discover/synthesize some of it.

 

[Drakkith]

Negative mass, also called exotic matter, would have repulsive gravity. Though we have yet to discover/synthesize some of it.

Maybe. But until we have some evidence of it there's no reason to bring it up.

 

[Pengwuino]

were any of these "types" of matter already around before the big bang? or was it only afterward that we think they formed?

We have no idea what happened before the big bang. In fact, current mainstream cosmology states that there is no such thing as "before the big bang". The big bang was the start of everything.

Currently the only "types" of matter we have actually observed are normal matter and anti-matter. We have reasons for thinking there is something called dark matter, but we havn't been able to verify that yet.

I think this is a little misleading. We "see" dark matter. We know it's there. We just don't know what it is (although of course maybe it ISN'T there and our observations are explainable by something like MOND).

 

[Chalnoth]

were any of these "types" of matter already around before the big bang? or was it only afterward that we think they formed?

This plot shows every particle we have ever seen in a lab:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg

Note that all of these particles have corresponding anti-particles (though the photon's anti-particle is itself).

Dark matter cannot be any of these particles, because dark matter cannot have electric charge, and the only particles with mass that have no electric charge in the standard model are neutrinos, and the neutrinos have masses too small for the neutrinos to collect around galaxies in sufficient quantities to explain the missing mass.

Thus dark matter is our first direct evidence of physics beyond the standard model. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell us much, as all it says is that there is some other massive particle with no electric charge out there. We don't yet have enough information to nail it down much more than that.