Could the matter/antimatter imbalance be a local phenomenon?
So I want to preface this by saying I am, by no means, a physics expert. I’m just someone who’s always had an interest for physics but never had the mathematical inclination to truly study it. I don’t claim to know better than the experts, I mostly ask this to understand how we know it’s NOT the case. That being said:
I know that, as far as we know, the universe at the big bang should have made equal parts matter and antimatter. They should have annihilated instantly and basically naught but energy and gamma ray photons would remain. Except for some reason, for every billion matter/antimatter pair generated an extra matter particle was made (idk if that’s the exact ratio). This extra particle in a billion pairs led to all the matter we see now, but we’re not really sure *why* this extra particle was made.
My question is this- we have no earthy idea how big the true universe is, assuming it’s not just infinite; could the answer be that the universe, as a whole, did create an even amount of matter and antimatter… but on very small localized levels, an imbalance was created? How do we KNOW for sure that this imbalance is something we can extrapolate to the entire universe and create an issue in physics? Could there be small pockets of the universe where more anti-matter was made, and so for an observer their entire universe would be antimatter?