Antimatter, one of the great mysteries of the universe, continues to take giant steps towards the future. antimysterio. The historic work of Isaac Newton about the Earth’s gravity was allegedly inspired by an apple falling on his head from a tree. But what would happen to a antimanzana made of antimatter? Would it fall the same way if it existed? According to the theory of general relativity Albert EinsteinYes, but it took us a century to prove it.
Like Galileo Galilei The tower of Pisa was climbed 500 years ago to demonstrate that two spheres of different masses reached the bottom at the same time, and not the heavier one first, as one might assume, scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) dropped one hundred molecules of antihydrogen in the face of the possibility that antimatter would not behave in the same way as matter, and instead of falling to the ground they would be repelled upwards.
The result of the experiment has been that antimatter does not have antigravity, so antihydrogen behaved exactly the same as hydrogenand the metaphorical Tower of Pisa descended, created by international researchers from the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at CERN in Switzerland, in collaboration with more than a dozen countries and private institutions, including the United States Department of National Sciences.
The discovery, published today in Nature, serves to rule out that gravitational repulsion is the reason why almost everything in the universe is matter, and the antimatter has not gone elsewhere expelled by gravity. “In physics, you don’t really know something until you observe it,” says ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst. “It is a milestone in the study of antimatter, which still baffles us by its apparent absence in the Universe.”
Our bodies, the Earth, and almost everything scientists know about the universe are overwhelmingly composed of regular matter, with protons, neutrons, and electrons, as well as atoms of oxygen, carbon, iron, and other elements of the periodic table. . Antimatter is neither dark nor invisible matter. In fact, it is generated in places as inhospitable as the disintegration of potassium inside a banana. It is simply a twin of matter but with some opposite properties. For example, while protons have a positive charge, antiprotons have a negative charge. Just as antielectrons (also known as positrons) are positive while electrons are negative.