Genesis

Thursday Trivia of the Cosmic Kind:

Antimatter Held For Questioning 

 

 

Researchers are a step closer to the fantastical Angels & Demons scenario dreamt up by novelist Dan Brown, in which a rogue priest tries to destroy the Vatican with a vial full of antimatter. In reality, the amount of antimatter created to date wouldn’t release enough energy to heat a pot of coffee, but physicists at CERN - the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva - have now managed to make & hold dozens of antihydrogen atoms for a full sixteen minutes, far longer than ever before. The work is a significant step toward making antimatter stick around long enough to be able to study how it differs from ordinary matter.

Antimatter, whose existence was predicted by physicist Paul Dirac in 1931, is made of particles with electric charges that are opposite those of ordinary matter. Just as a hydrogen atom is made up of a positively charged proton & a negatively charged electron, an antihydrogen atom is made up of a negatively charged antiproton & a positively charged positron. When matter & antimatter meet, they annihilate.

Theory suggests that equal amounts of matter & antimatter should have been formed in the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, & physicists have long puzzled over why matter predominates, in a fundamental mystery that has persisted for eight decades. With this achievement, we may finally be poised to understand not only the universe that is but also the universe that might have been.

Npr.org
Sciencenews.org
Image: deviantart.com