14 Potential Objects
Made of Antimatter Few 19th century astronomers struggling to see celestial bodies in the shimmering firmament through a telescope could have envisioned cosmic wonders awaiting discovery in the next century.
The stars are so dense that a teaspoon of such matter will weigh like a mountain. Objects so compact that nothing can overcome their gravitational pull. And even galaxies were yet to be discovered.
The development of theory and technology opened the Universe to us, and allowed us not only to see the invisible, but also to hear the footsteps of distant dark giants. It is difficult to imagine that something else may be hiding from us - however, hypothetically, there may be objects that will make your head spin.
Perhaps astronomers will find them in the future.
Black dwarfs
Having consumed fuel, stars like our Sun will turn into spheres with a diameter of the Earth, consisting of a very compact material - each cubic centimeter of it will weigh about a ton. And although after that they will still glow, being incandescent, we call such objects white dwarfs .
Since white dwarfs no longer squeeze light from thermonuclear reactions, they gradually cool down. After a hundred million billion years, such a dwarf will finally reach equilibrium with the background temperature of the environment, and become completely dark.
Our Universe is not even 14 billion years old, so there is no point in looking for them yet. But time will pass, and our sky will become a graveyard of stellar corpses - black dwarfs.
The likelihood of their existence is almost certain, you just have to wait.
Landau - Thorna - Zhitkov object
Fortunately, there are still several billion years left before our Sun leaves its retirement. And before turning off its engine, our star will stop pulling its atmosphere so strongly, and will allow its waist to expand, turning into a red giant.
It is not yet clear whether the roasted remains of the Earth will fall within the boundaries of a swollen star, or whether the Sun's gradual loss of mass will lead to the fact that the Earth's orbit will constantly expand.
If the planet happens to meet the atmosphere, then the plasma washing it will surely slow down its movement, after which it will quickly spiral into the star.
But what if instead of our rocky planet, there was a more powerful object in orbit - for example, another star? Could she have lasted longer, cutting circles around her red giant companion like a space goldfish circling in a hellish aquarium?
This is the general idea of the Landau - Thorne - Zhitkov object . It was named after physicists Lev Landau, Kip Thorn and Anna Zhitkov. In 1977, they calculated what would happen when a red supergiant and a neutron star merge under certain conditions.
According to their calculations, it turned out that a neutron star can jerk inside a red giant for two hundred years, after which it will merge with its core, thus forming either a heavier neutron star, or, in the presence of sufficient mass, collapsing into a black hole.
In 2014, astronomers decided that they had found an example of such an object - the star HV 2112. Not all researchers support this point of view, and consider the existence of such hybrids unconfirmed.
The likelihood of existence: high enough. The numbers converge, you just need to find them.
Bosonic stars
According to the Standard Model in physics, there are two types of particles .
The team of fermions is represented by the building blocks of matter, pieces of reality that do not overlap, due to which atoms are formed and molecules grow.
In the boson team, there is a zoo of particles that control the behavior of physical interactions, thanks to which fermions cling to each other or repel each other, giving rise to everything from nuclear decay to the spectrum of light and all chemistry in general.
Unlike fermions, bosons have no problem staying at one point in space. Where there are already 20 bosons, there is always room for 20 more.
In theory, there is one loophole that would make bosons less friendly. A hypothetical boson axion may have a small mass and bounce off other axions that have gathered in a ball.
A sufficiently large number of axions together will create a balanced cloud that will not block light and emit its own. As with black holes, we can only find such dark bosonic stars by their gravitational influence on the environment.
Their existence could help explain the nature of dark matter. Could.
Probability of Existence: Low. So far, we have no convincing evidence of the existence of axions.
Loose ball darkino
We are already at the beginning of the next decade of the 21st century, and still have no idea what this strange phenomenon is - dark matter.
Does it consist of slowly moving particles? Do they interact with themselves? Will it concentrate into black holes, or is it more like a fog?
Having made fairly broad assumptions about its nature - for example, these are small-mass particles that are attracted to each other, much smaller than an electron in size - we can assume that a sufficiently large amount of this substance can flow down to the center of the galaxy and form a giant ball.
Because of their tiny mass, this ball will surround a hazy halo of dark matter particles slowly moving towards the center. Before they collapse into a black hole, their total mass will be comparable to several million suns.
There are many assumptions, and yet they can explain why objects near the chaotic center of the Milky Way do not move exactly as if they were revolving around a more compact mass.
The gravitational pull of this loose ball of fermions, dubbed "darkino", can pull enough mass toward itself to explain the orbits of these objects.
Probability of Existence: Quite low. First you need to understand what dark matter is.
Anti-stars
For a universe like ours to emerge, an impressive two-for-one stock is required. For every particle emerging from nothingness in the seething ocean of quantum foam, there must be a particle of antimatter with the opposite charge.
However, having met, these particles will disappear again, leaving behind only a cloud of radiation.
Judging by how much matter surrounds us, 13.8 billion years ago, for some reason, a lot of matter was not destroyed. Either for some reason a large amount of antimatter did not appear, or it hid somewhere or disappeared before it managed to mutually annihilate from the full substance of the Universe.
This is one of the mysteries over which physicists struggle hard.
It's funny, however, that if a star consisting of missing antimatter hangs somewhere in the night sky , from the outside it will look like any other dazzling ball of gas. The only hint of its nature will be the characteristic bursts of gamma radiation that occur when its antihydrogen atoms annihilate with rare scraps of matter crashing into it.
Earlier this year, astronomers published the results of an observation looking for similar characteristic flares. Removing all unnecessary, scientists settled on a list of 14 candidates for anti-stars.
This does not mean that in our Milky Way there are actually more than a dozen stars composed of antimatter. They may still be known sources of gamma radiation such as pulsars or black holes. But if anti-stars exist, then such gamma-scintillation will be just characteristic of them.
Probability of existence: extremely low. However, it could have made a good Star Trek episode.