youtube.nixfred.com nixfred.com
Creator

Astrum Extra

The second channel from the Astrum team, same host Alex McColgan, where the long compilations and extended cuts live. Separate channel from the main Astrum and from Astrum Earth.

1video

← All videos

1:01:20
Astrum Extra

Where Is All the Antimatter in the Universe?

An hour on the biggest bookkeeping error in physics: the Big Bang should have made matter and antimatter in equal amounts, they annihilate on contact, and yet here we are. Three Astrum films run back to back. First a thought experiment with real arithmetic in it, working out from the mass of the atmospheric column what an antimatter meteor would do to the Earth, and landing on a number that beats the Tsar Bomba by hundreds of times. Then the physics itself, from Anderson's 1932 cloud chamber and Dirac's earlier prediction through a force by force hunt for any difference between matter and antimatter, ending on ALPHA at CERN measuring antihydrogen in free fall at 0.75 g. Finally the payoff: antimatter really is raining on the Earth right now, AMS-02 has counted more than 400,000 positrons from the space station, and the source turns out to be Geminga, a dead star 800 light years away that spent fifty years pretending it was not there.

PhysicsScienceJul 26, 2026