Antimatter, as you know, is the opposite of matter. When the two meet, they release a large amount of energy and annihilate each other. When the universe was created, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts, but one of the biggest scientific mysteries to this day is what kind of asymmetry caused the fact that matter as we know it eventually came out on top, and antimatter is nowhere to be found. They can only be found if we create them.
Producing antimatter is very complicated. It cannot be stored in the usual way, because it explodes when it comes into contact with matter, so it must be trapped by magnetic fields. However, scientists are very interested in antimatter because of the aforementioned mysteries, and CERN had the appropriate technical equipment available to answer certain questions by conducting experiments.
Since we are talking about the opposite of matter, the question arises as to whether it falls in the same way as a result of the attraction of mass caused by matter, or how exactly it begins to rise. The father of the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein, believed that antimatter behaves in the same way as matter under the influence of mass gravity, that is, it falls downward.
Professor Jeffrey Hangst recently collected a few thousand anti-atoms to project them. For this purpose, antiprotons produced in a particle accelerator are directed to a special ring, where they are slowed down. This was the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus, or ALPHA, in which the positrons (antielectrons) orbited the antiprotons, and the antihydrogen was completed.
When the magnetic field storing the antihydrogen was stopped, they were able to observe where and at what speed the antimatter fell. the nature The results of the research published in its columns confirmed Einstein: that antimatter also fell to the bottom, and its gravitational acceleration, like matter, was 9.8 m/s per second.
If antimatter had fallen upward, it would have completely upended physics. This is the situation
They ruled out the existence of antigravity,
Drives another wedge between science fiction and reality.
Since the result is completely consistent with what we know so far, we are no closer to solving the mystery, but in the future the experiment will be repeated with measurements a hundred times more sensitive, so it may become clear if there is a finer difference between the behavior of matter and antimatter.
(CERN)
