this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Antimatter has opposite charge, same forces, same mass. They experience and exert all the same forces in all the same ways, including gravity.
No, during annihilation, especially in low-energy collisions, you usually just get two gamma ray photons out. At higher-energy collisions, you do get massive particles (as in particles that have mass, not big huge particles), but they're perfectly ordinary (well, relatively ordinary, anyway). Wikipedia has a pretty good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation
No, dark matter is also relatively ordinary matter as far as we know, except for the fact that it doesn't really interact with other matter or energy except gravity. Technically it's also hypothetical, because there isn't any nearby for us to get a good look at or take a sample, but it's our working theory. Because it appears to interact normally with gravity (i.e. dark matter gravitates toward other matter and bends light as expected) it's almost certainly not a mirror universe doing something funky. Plus, the dark/normal matter ratio in the observable universe is 85/15%, so if it was a mirror universe, wouldn't it be 50/50?
Thanks! It's so weird the commonly understood kind of antimatter in sci-fi is totally different from reality.
Here's another one for you. If our Galaxy is full of Dark Matter that doesn't interact with anything wouldn't a whole bunch of it end up in the middle of our planet and every star? Thus making them way heavier and invalidating the paradox we see?