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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We know pretty well what matter is and how it interacts with the others.

Dark matter interacts through gravity but not light. Beyond that I haven't heard much else.

And lastly anti-matter has an opposite charge and interacts with matter through annihilation. I think I remember hearing that it would react with dark matter the same way.

So my question is, does anti-dark matter exist, and what are it's properties?

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

There are hypothesis that dark matter particles are their own anti particle, which would mean that they would annihilate when they come in contact with each other.

The people looking for them are examining high energy bursts around supermassive black holes as potentially coming from that. No idea how they could ever approach finding any evidence for that. But that's their problem.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Dark matter interacts via gravity but not electromagnetism (including light). So its particles would have no electric charge, and thus no distinct antiparticles.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

That's the answer I was really wondering about. If dark matter doesn't annihilate with anti-matter then it could potentionally be used for anti-matter containment?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The problem with matter that doesn’t interact electromagnetically is that everything else can pass right through it. (That’s why dark matter theoretically remains in halos around galaxies instead of getting incorporated into galactic discs via friction with other matter.)

If dark matter can only interact via gravity, it can only attract other matter toward it (albeit very weakly)—including both matter and antimatter. So it can’t keep matter and antimatter apart.

You’d also have no way of manipulating the dark matter itself, except through gravity.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Well darn...

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think I remember hearing that it would react with dark matter the same way.

Like matter, it doesn't interact with dark matter to any detectable degree.

I say "doesn't" on purpose, because we have small containers of the stuff tucked away in labs, and it's (momentarily) created as an inevitable byproduct of particle accelerators and certain radioactive decays.

So my question is, does anti-dark matter exist, and what are it’s properties?

Nobody knows what dark matter is beyond it being everywhere and heavy, so double don't-know. There's no particular reason to think it would follow a similar pattern, though.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

The problem with dark matter is that we don't know what it is. If it's a particle, then presumably there probably would be an antiparticle for it. However, we don't actually know if it's a particle or not.

There's some hypotheses that say that dark matter doesn't physically exist, and that our theories of gravity are just incomplete. There's some other hypotheses that say that dark matter might be really small black holes. And then there's some hypotheses that say that dark matter is a particle. Until we find out more about what it is, we simply can't say for sure what sorts of properties it has

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Speaking of our incomplete theory of gravity, do gravitational waves behave similarly to ocean waves in that they can combine together to create a bigger wave? And if so could there be rogue gravitational waves like there are rogue waves in the ocean?

this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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