PHYSICISTS have announced a breakthrough in their quest to answer one of science's great questions: do the same laws of gravity apply to antimatter - the obscure counterpart of matter as we know it?
Though antimatter is thought to have existed in equal quantities to matter at the moment of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, it is rare today and scientists who wish to study antimatter particles have to manufacture them.
In the Universe, antimatter particles are thought to exist mainly around black holes and in cosmic rays.
For more than 50 years, scientists have debated whether gravity would attract or repel antimatter particles -- whether they would fall down like conventional matter or "up" due to a kind of antigravity.
While the question remains unsolved for now, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Communications they had developed the beginnings of a test that should lead to a conclusive answer.
"This is the first word, not the last," said Joel Fajans, a member of the research team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Alpha experiment.
"We've taken the first steps toward a direct experimental test of questions physicists and non-physicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years."
Antimatter particles have opposite properties to ordinary matter particles, including their electric charge. A positively-charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle equivalent of the negatively-charged electron.
When an opposing pair meets, particles and anti-particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy, which means that if an even balance had continued to persist after the Big Bang, the Universe would never have come into being.
But how this imbalance came about is a great riddle for particle physics.
"We certainly expect antimatter to fall down, but just maybe we will be surprised," said Fajans, a University of California physics professor.
"In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works."
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