• Question: Where did all the antimatter go?

    Asked by anon-258065 on 29 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Anne Green

      Anne Green answered on 29 Jun 2020:

      AFAWK it annihilated with matter in the early Universe and produced lots of photons. In fact if equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were produced in the Big Bang they would cancel each other out and there would be no matter for us (and planets and stars) to be made of. Understanding why initially there was slighty more matter than anti-matter is a big open question in cosmology and particle physics.

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 30 Jun 2020:

      When antimatter meets normal matter, they ‘annihilate’ each other. This means they destroy each other and become energy. We think that most of the antimatter was destroyed in this way. Like Anne said, we still don’t know why there was more normal matter than antimatter originally, but we are lucky there was or we would never have existed!

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