Antimatter is the polar opposite of matter, which is the building block of stars and planets.
Both were created in equal parts during the Big Bang that created our Universe. While matter is everywhere, its inverse is today exceedingly difficult to locate.
According to the most recent research, the two react to gravity in the same way.
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For years, physicists have been trying to figure out their differences and similarities in order to explain how the Universe came to be.
The discovery that antimatter climbed in reaction to gravity rather than falling would have shattered our understanding of physics.
They have now confirmed for the first time that antimatter atoms slide downwards. However, rather than being a scientific dead end, this opens the way for new investigations and theories. Is it falling at the same rate, for example?
Matter and antimatter should have merged and cancelled each other out at the Big Bang, leaving nothing but light. One of physics’ great mysteries is why they didn’t, and discovering distinctions between the two is the key to solving it.
In those early moments of creation, matter defeated antimatter. According to Dr Danielle Hodgkinson, a member of the study team at Cern in Switzerland, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, how it responds to gravity may hold the key.
“We don’t understand how our Universe came to be matter-dominated and so this is what motivates our experiments,” she stated to me.
