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Antimatter-Gravity ‘Alpha’ Experiment At CERN Tests Force’s Effect, Yields Ambiguous Result

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When it comes to antimatter, what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down. In a new study, physicists weighed antimatter in an effort to determine how this strange cousin of matter interacts with gravity.

Ordinary matter atoms fall down due to the pull of gravity, but the same might not be true of antimatter, which has the same mass as matter, but opposite charge and spin. Scientists wondered whether antimatter atoms would instead fall up when pulled by gravity, and whether such a thing as antigravity exists.

“In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upward, we’d have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works,” Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Fajans and his colleagues at the Alpha experiment at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab made the first experimental measurements of the gravitational mass of antihydrogen — the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, made of an antiproton and a positron (the antimatter counterpart to an electron). [Whoa! The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

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Antimatter

This illustration of antimatter shows antiparticle beside its particle mirror-image.

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ISS Dark Matter Detector Finds Hint Of Elusive Particles From Cosmos, Scientists Say (VIDEO)

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It is one of the cosmos’ most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can’t see it, but scientists are pretty sure it’s out there.

Led by a dogged, Nobel Prize-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.

But the evidence isn’t enough to declare the case closed. The footprints could have come from another, more conventional suspect: a pulsar, or a rotating, radiation-emitting star.

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