Researchers have discovered that antimatter properties may not be very different from those of regular matter, as they believed, this being another phase in revealing one major secret of our universe. For many decades, it has been a challenge for physics and modern technology to prove that space, as we perceive it, is made from other things than common matter, with almost no antimatter around i, even if these two categories should be distributed evenly.
The Big Bang, the initial point from when the universe started to expand, created matter and antimatter in approximately equivalent quantities. But that is not the space that scientists observe today, since antimatter is an incredibly unusual element and a big mystery for them.
Even if this contradiction has been noticed for many years and little signs have appeared, it continues to be one of the major dilemmas of modern physics. Anything they find about the characteristics of antimatter can possibly help fixing this problem. The scientists have realized that the attractive energy between antiprotons is identical to the forces between protons by analyzing the waste remaining after particle collisions, which created similar circumstances for the Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider from Switzerland is probably the most appropriate location on our planet that is able to generate antimatter in important amounts. This process is realized by hitting the nuclei of large atoms like silver at incredible speeds close to that of light. The objective is to replicate the circumstances in space after some nanoseconds after the Big Bang to determine exactly what occurred next.
By analyzing the numerous connections between different antiprotons and their lifespan, researchers were able to demonstrate that attractive forces between them work in the same way as matter particles, eliminating one possible idea for why large amounts of antimatter have practically vanished from the early universe.
Probably antimatter did not have a similar attractive power to that of matter and this would have described how these variations, during the first seconds after the Big Bang, could have led to antimatter not surviving through in the form of planets and stars, as large amounts of matter did.
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