Thursday 4 April 2013 08.20 BST
guardian.co.uk
Posted by Stuart Clark
“The
first data from the $2bn Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment on the
International Space Station has confirmed a strange antimatter signal coming
from space. However, the experiment has not yet collected enough data to allow
scientists to determine the source of this antimatter.
It
could be coming from dark matter particles, making this a major breakthrough.
Or it could be coming from fast-spinning stellar corpses known as pulsars,
making it merely interesting.
AMS
cannot detect dark matter directly but it can detect antimatter, which some
theories say will be produced when dark matter particles collide.
The
antimatter signal that AMS has confirmed was first announced in 2008 by
researchers using another space-based detector. The PAMELA satellite (Payload
for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) was a
multinational collaboration between Russia, Italy, Germany and Sweden. It was
launched in 2006 and is still collecting data.
PAMELA
discovered more positrons, the antimatter counterpart of the electron, than
researchers were expecting. It spotted one positron for every 100 electrons but
astronomers were expecting around one positron for every 10,000 electrons.
AMS
has confirmed this excess to an unprecedented level of precision but its
results can hardly be called the first hint of dark matter.
The
experiment's principal investigator, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, says the
evidence collected so far "supports the existence of dark matter but
cannot rule out pulsars". He could quite easily have said that sentence
round the other way.
The
results so far have nothing new to say about the source of the antimatter.
AMS,
like PAMELA before it, works by detecting naturally occurring particles in
space called cosmic rays. The spacecraft's detectors identify the particles
according to their energy and electrical charge…
…•
This article was amended on 4 April 2013 to make it clearer that antimatter
particles are a possible signature of dark matter”
The detector, it would appear, has detected
the annihilation signature of antimatter. An internet search quickly reveals
many correspondents, not this one, readily accept this as proof of Dark Matter.
It’s no such thing; it is proof of a unexplainably large proportion of
antimatter annihilation.
Those of you who have read any of my
writings will realise that my view is based on two postulates. One is that
General Relativity is correct and secondly that matter and antimatter travel in
the opposite directions in time. If correct, a black hole should emit
antimatter particles from within the event horizon.
We are very certain that most, if not all,
galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores. We know that our galaxy
has two massive lobes, one above and one below the plane of the galaxy and
extending nearly the diameter of the galaxy, where antimatter annihilation is
seen to take place. Most, if not all, galaxies should be the same as they too have
central black holes. Therefore we should expect annihilation cosmic rays to
bombard the Earth from all directions which is exactly what we see.
Although there may be many possible
explanations for the source of these cosmic rays, the simplest explanation by
far is the antimatter particles are being emitted by black holes.
What are the implications of black holes
emitting antimatter particles and how does this fit in with observations? If
antimatter is ordinary matter but traveling in the opposite direction in time,
it is not meant to exist in our Universe as it is not on the same time line. A
valid way of looking at the situation is antimatter travels faster than the
speed of light therefore you cannot see it. In that sense antimatter is ‘dark’
matter. Antimatter, in its short life, is gravitationally repulsive to ordinary
matter so it helps to expand space. Of course if it’s gravitationally repulsive
it does the complete opposite of what mainstream require it to do. It cannot
account for the galaxy rotation anomaly or galaxy cluster anomaly for example.
Regardless of whether antimatter is
gravitationally attractive or repulsive, when it mutually annihilates with
ordinary matter it creates photons (energy) and that creates space. As black
holes constantly transform their matter mass into antimatter mass, the ratio of
matter mass to energy in the Universe is constantly changing in favour of
energy. The result being that time is constantly contracting and space is
constantly expanding and that expansion is accelerating in time. How does this
fit in with dark energy? Dark energy is believed to be responsible for the
expansion of space but does not react with anything other than space. Photons
expand space but are invisible and can therefore be regarded as ‘dark’ energy.
Photons react with space as they are a major constituent of space-time. Photons
are invisible and do not react with anything until obliterated at which point
they are no longer photons. We don’t ‘see’ photons (light) we see the
aftereffect.
To sum up:-
The detector has found a signature for
‘dark’ matter (antimatter) but this dark matter could have the opposite effect
on gravity than that required. The detector has discovered ‘dark’ energy (Light
[don’t you just love the irony?]) that works in exactly the way required and
predicted but is not the mysterious dark energy that is believed to exist. So,
the detector was looking for dark matter which it has found but maybe not thee dark matter but it has found dark
energy which it wasn’t looking for but not thee
mysterious dark energy.
Dark matter is believed to represent about
23 to 24 % of the Universe. If that dark matter is antimatter, it is probably
only a matter of time before it mutually annihilates with ordinary matter which
represents less than 5%. The antimatter will, given enough time (and it has all
of the time in the Universe), annihilate the matter Universe and become
dominant.
All of this fits in perfectly with my
cyclic universe theory as expressed in my books and website documents.
