Some pulsars and neutron stars could be formed of an exotic material unlike that found in normal stars. A new study suggests a way to find these strange quark objects.
The colors and contours indicate surface brightness, and the red arrows show its estimated size. The discovery of a new and rarely seen nebula 10 billion light-years away has created a cosmic mystery: What is lighting up this dusty cloud of gases? Researchers led by Zheng Cai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered an "enormous Lyman-alpha nebula," or ELAN, only the third of these vast cosmic structures ever seen.
For the first time, physicists have shown that atoms of antimatter appear to give off the same kind of light that atoms of regular matter do when illuminated with lasers, a new study finds. More precise measurements of this emitted light could unearth clues that might finally help solve the mystery of why there is so much less antimatter than normal matter in the universe, researchers say.
Antimatter is weird stuff. It was created during the Big Bang along with traditional matter, but it has the exact opposite properties of the kinds of matter we know: anti-electrons have a positive charge rather than negative, for example, while antiprotons, the antimatter versions of positively charged protons, are negatively charged.