Antimatter by Alicia Sometimes

Big Bang’s first fierce fight
             — particle antithesis —
                       wrestling imbalance
By Alicia Sometimes

The early universe didn’t create equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The reason for the matter-antimatter asymmetry is still not entirely known. Abbaslu et al. (2019) look at the properties and questions surrounding the hypermagnetic field. I wanted to capture the ‘battle’ between matter and antimatter and the chirality between the two.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.116022

Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and more. She is director and co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. She is currently a Science Gallery Melbourne ‘Leonardo’ (creative advisor). Her TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about the passion of combining art with science. You can catch up with her on Twitter @aliciasometimes and at her website www.aliciasometimes.com

Enjoyed Alicia’s sciku? Check out her other poems ‘The Born Rule’ and ‘Axiogenesis‘.

Petite galaxy

Petite galaxy,

so young and oxygen-poor.

What can you tell us?

 

As the first galaxies formed they were chemically simple, composed of elements (hydrogen and helium) made during the first 3 minutes of the universe’s existence following the big bang. Oxygen and other complex elements formed later leading to the creation of oxygen-rich galaxies throughout the universe (like the Milky Way). In order to understand primordial galaxies astronomers need to observe oxygen-poor galaxies but finding such galaxies close enough for observation is extremely difficult.

Now a study by Izotov et al (2017) has found the most metal-poor dwarf star-forming galaxy known to date (J0811+4730), which has 9% less oxygen than any galaxy discovered so far. Observations of the young galaxy J0811+4730 could provide information about those galaxies formed during the early period of the universe as well as insights into how the early universe became re-ionized.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx2478