Scientists have made an important discovery about the mysterious antimatter, which was abundant when the Universe first formed.
Antimatter is the opposite of matter. They emerged in equal amounts in the Big Bang, which created our universe. Although matter is everywhere, antimatter is quite difficult to find.
The latest study concluded that both matter and antimatter respond the same to gravity.
Physicists have been working for years to find the differences and similarities of matter and antimatter to explain how the Universe formed.
If it were discovered that it responds to gravity by rising rather than falling, it would shatter everything we know about physics.
For the first time, it was determined that the atoms of antimatter also fell downwards. However, this is not a scientific end, on the contrary, it opens the doors to new experiments and theories. For example, are they falling at the same rate?
During the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were supposed to annihilate each other, leaving nothing but light. Why this is not the case is one of the greatest mysteries of physics, and discovering the differences is of great importance for the solution.
In those first moments when the universe was formed, matter somehow prevailed over antimatter.
Dr. from CERN, the world’s largest physics laboratory, Switzerland. How antimatter responds to gravity could be the key to solving the mystery, Danielle Hodgkingson explained.
“We don’t understand how matter predominates in our universe. So that may be the motivation for our experiments,” says Hodgkingson.
Antimatter in the universe exists only for a moment, a fraction of a second. Therefore, the CERN team needed to make antimatter stable and last longer.
Prof. Jeffrey Hangst spent 30 years building a facility that would collect thousands of antimatter atoms from subatomic particles, hold them in one place, and watch their reaction to gravity.
“Antimatter is the coolest, most mysterious thing you can think of. As far as we can tell, we can build a universe made only of antimatter. It’s an inspiring thing to tackle this issue. It’s one of the most fundamental questions about what antimatter is and how it behaves,” Hangst says.
What is antimatter?
Let’s start with what matter is: Everything in the world is made up of matter, tiny particles called atoms.
The simplest atom is the hydrogen atom. The Sun consists largely of hydrogen atoms. A hydrogen atom consists of a negatively charged electron orbiting a positively charged proton.
In antimatter, the electric charges are exactly opposite.
To give an example, antihydrogen, the antimatter version of hydrogen, was used in experiments at CERN. There is a positively charged electron (positron) orbiting a negatively charged proton (antiproton).
These antiprotons were created by colliding particles in accelerators at CERN. They reached a speed close to the speed of light through pipes to the antimatter laboratory. This was too high a speed for researchers to take control.
In the first stage, they are slowed down by rotating them around a ring. This drains their energy and they slow down to more manageable speeds.
The antiprotons and positrons are then sent to a giant magnet, where they mix to form thousands of antihydrogen atoms.
The magnet creates a magnetic field that traps the antihydrogen. If antimatter touches the edge of the container it is in, it instantly disappears, because antimatter cannot survive friction with our world.
When the magnetic field is turned off, the antihydrogen atoms are released. The sensors then detect whether they are going up or down.
Some theorists had previously predicted that antimatter would fall when it encountered gravity. In particular, Albert Einstein stated more than 100 years ago in his Theory of Relativity that antimatter should react and fall down just like matter.
Researchers at CERN thus confirmed Einstein with much greater clarity.
However, the fact that antimatter falls downwards rather than upwards against gravity does not mean that it falls at the same speed as matter.
For the next step of the research, the team is updating their experiments and making them more sensitive. The aim is to find out whether there is a small speed difference between antimatter and matter as it falls against gravity.
So, the biggest question of all, how the Universe was created, may be answered. Surely this order has an owner, a creator.