Why black holes could be antimatter factories

Black hole

Here’s an interesting chain of thought…

Imagine a black hole sucking in protons and electrons. With their higher mass,  protons are likely to be preferentially sucked, giving the black hole a positive charge. (That’s not so unusual in space: a similar mechanism can give planets a charge because electrons escape their gravity more easily.)

But black holes also create such strong electrostatic fields at the horizon that positrons and electrons simply appear out of the vacuum.

In those circumstances, it’ll look as if the protons being sucked into the black hole are being converted into positrons.

So these kinds of black holes will look and behave like antimatter factories, say Cosimo Bambi from Wayne State University in Detroit and pals.

How might we we spot these exotic objects? Bambi and friends say a sure signature would be an excess of positrons in cosmic rays  with an energy between 1 and 100 MeV coming from a black hole.

Anybody seen any of these?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0806.3440: Black Holes as Antimatter Factories

5 Responses to “Why black holes could be antimatter factories”

  1. Tony2heads says:

    What about the 0.5MeV positron-electron annihilation line seen from the galactic centre

    http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702621

  2. jim says:

    Quasars?

  3. To contribute to 0.5 MeV annihilation _line_ the emmitted positrons have to be almost at rest (or be very efficiently slowed down). So this mechanism would produce a tail on that distribution…

  4. Zephir says:

    Re: Tony

    You can imagine, here’s a dynamic equilibrium between gravitational and electromagnetic field inside of particles. The light materializes in strong electromagnetic field, while the opposite process occurs inside of strong gravitational field of black holes – the matter is dissolving into radiation here. If the black hole is sufficiently large, most of matter will dissolve faster, then it can reach the event horizon.

    Now you can consider the candle flame sooting phenomena: when cooled down fast, the candle flame releases a tiny particles of carbon – even at the presence of excessive oxygen. As another example can serve the abandoned Birkeland-Eyde process of fixation of atmospheric nitrogen in electric arc for production of nitric acid, during which the thermodynamically metastable mixture of nitrous oxides can be isolated.

    http://como.cheng.cam.ac.uk/pictures/sooting_flame.jpg

    http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/images/fyzika/experiments/lichtenberg/zkrat500.avi

    The reason is the Le-Chatalier principle of thermodynamical equilibrium, generalized into non-equilibrate states (relativistic aether thermodynamics). The mixture of matter and antimatter is metastable, but when removed from gravitational field of black hole by radiative pressure by sufficiently fast way (i.e. “cooled”), these particles can reach the safe distance, so they cannot recombine again immediately. The slow recombination “luminescence” is what the 0.5MeV positron-electron annihilation signal is.