Emily Chan
A newly found antiparticle contains the heaviest antimatter nucleus that has ever been detected. It could potentially hold the secrets to how our universe came to be.
The antimatter nucleus is called antihyperhydrogen-4. It is made up of an antihyperon, an antiproton and two antineutrons.
Scientists discovered traces of this antimatter along particle tracks from six billion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
By studying the particle, physicists hope to uncover the differences between matter and antimatter, which could help explain why our universe is filled with matter, even though antimatter was also created at the beginning of time.
“Our physics knowledge about matter and antimatter is that, except for having opposite electric charges, antimatter has the same properties as matter—same mass, same lifetime before decaying and same interactions,” said Junlin Wu, a co-author of the study and a graduate student from the Joint Department for Nuclear Physics at Lanzhou University and Institute of Modern Physics.
After the Big Bang, the young universe contained an abundance of matter and antimatter particles that destroyed each other once they made contact.
According to scientific theory, the matter and antimatter should have wiped each other off the map entirely.
However, scientists think that some kind of unknown process enabled more matter to be produced than antimatter.
As a result, the universe was saved from self-destruction. The researchers behind the new study wanted to figure out what force or process led to the imbalance between matter and antimatter particles.
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