Einstein proven right again, scientists find antimatter ‘falling’, not defying gravity

In what is being called a 'huge milestone', scientists at CERN has been able to observe antimatter particles, the existence of which was predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity more than hundred years ago. Antimatter is the twin of visible matter that is all around us. The announcement of observation of antimatter was made on Wednesday (September 27).

The scientists have observed 'falling' antimatter. The observation definitively rules out that gravity repels antimatter upwards. If the previously held notion were to be true, it would have upended the vertu fundamental understanding of the Universe.

It is believed that the Big Bang, the unimaginably huge explosion that formed the entire Universe 13.8 billion years ago, formed equal amount of matter and antimatter.

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Everything we see or feel is made of Matter while Antimatter is the equal but opposite counterpart.

However there is virtually no antimatter in the universe, which prompted one of the greatest mysteries of physics: what happened to all the antimatter?

"Half the universe is missing," said Jeffrey Hangst, a member of CERN's ALPHA collaboration in Geneva which conducted the new experiment.

"In principle, we could build a universe -- everything that we know about -- with only antimatter, and it would work in exactly the same way," he told AFP.

Physicists believe that matter and antimatter almost entirely destroyed each other after the Big Bang.

Presently, matter makes up for just five per cent of the Universe while rest is made up of dark matter and dark energy. Antimatter meanwhile vanished.

Scientists had been trying to find answer to a key question for years. It was, whether gravity caused antimatter the same way as normal matter. It was held that gravity repels antimatter.

So, to connect the concept with the famous story of Newton's Apple, if the apple would have been made up of antimatter, would it have shot up into the sky? If gravity indeed repelled antimatter, it may have meant that creation of impossibilities such as perpetual motion machine was possible

But the experiment at CERN, carried out by team of scientists, yielded different result.

The team constructed a 25-centimetre-long (10-inch) bottle placed on its end, with magnets at the top and bottom.

Late last year, the scientists placed around 100 very cold antihydrogen atoms into this "magnetic trap" called ALPHA-g.

As they turned down the strength of both magnets, the antihydrogen particles -- which were bouncing around at 100 metres a second -- were able to escape out from either end of the bottle.

It was then simply counted how much antimatter was annihilated at each end of the bottle.

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It was found that around 80 per cent of the antihydrogen went out of the bottom, which is a similar rate to how regular bouncing hydrogen atoms would behave if they were in the bottle.

This result, published in the journal Nature, shows that gravity causes antimatter to fall downwards, as predicted by Einstein's 1915 theory of relativity.

(With inputs from agencies)

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