Protons (and neutron) are in the center, and electrons are swimming around on the outer shells. It's like the Big Bang's rebel child.īoth matter and antimatter are made of atoms similar to this one. Here's the weird part: Our universe also holds a tiny amount of antimatter, composed of atoms built with negative protons and positive electrons. The Big Bang gave rise to all this matter, and the rest is literally history. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, he reports an update: Antimatter doesn't react to gravity any differently than normal matter does.ĭon't worry if that last bit completely flew over your head, it'll all come together.Įverything from the sun to the device you're reading this article on is made up of the normal matter we know and love, composed of atoms built with positive protons and negative electrons. "If we pluck, in principle, the best physics theories … we would need to conclude that the universe, as we observe it, cannot exist," said Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at the RIKEN-led Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment at the European Council for Nuclear Research.īut… here we are playing Wordle and paying taxes, so either our laws of physics are wrong or we're missing massive pieces of the metaphysical puzzle.Īmong the army of scientists looking for those pieces, Ulmer has spent years studying the seed of our universe's existential crisis: antimatter. But there's a glaring gap in this chronicle, an aperture so big, solving it would shake our knowledge of reality. You're probably familiar with the following: 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang led to stars and galaxies, which led to planets and life, and eventually, to you and me.
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