New discoveries: Gravity affects Antimatter

On September 27, the results of the CERN Alpha experiment, acronym for the European Center for Nuclear Research, were published. This experiment tested nothing more and nothing less than the law of gravity.

It is popularly said that Isaac Newton did his work on the law of gravity, inspired by an apple that fell from the tree. An apple is something known; we can eat it as normal matter, but imagine what would happen with an apple made of antimatter, an anti-apple. , would fall in the same way, we can even wonder if it would fall.

Currently we work with Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, on which our modern theory of gravity is based. In this theory, antimatter and matter should fall to the earth in the same way, but that is something that It has never been seen and you already know that theories try to explain reality, but they are not reality and if reality does something different from what the theory predicts, we are wrong and the theory must be changed.

Seeing what happens to antimatter when it falls is what the Alpha experiment wanted to verify at the Cern antimatter factory. They observed what happened with a group of about 100 anti-Hydrogen atoms and verified that they fall to Earth in the same way. than normal hydrogen atoms.

The conclusion is that gravity affects matter and antimatter in the same way, a new point in favor of Albert Einstein.

Do not confuse antimatter with dark matter, dark matter is something different from antimatter and it has been calculated that dark matter is five times more abundant than normal matter, the matter that makes up our bodies, the earth, the rest of us. planets and stars, although unfortunately we still do not know what dark matter is, we only know that it does not interact with anything, although it is affected by gravity.

Antimatter was theorized for the first time almost a century ago by the British Paul Dirac, it is made up of antiparticles with opposite charges to particles of matter, for example, the electron of normal matter has a negative charge but the electron of antimatter has a positive charge, Also called positron, the contact between matter and antimatter causes mutual annihilation, although high-energy photons and Gamma rays can arise from this burst of energy.

That everything around us is matter and the very existence of the universe is a true paradox, because it turns out that during the Big Bang the same amount of matter had to be formed as antimatter, the universe should currently be a soup of radiation Gamma and particles, but for some reason that is not yet clear, although there are some very interesting hypotheses; The Big Bang had some kind of anomaly, an imbalance that ended up producing more matter than antimatter, which ended up driving the creation of everything around us.

Although antimatter is very rare, it is not something unknown to science, it can even be manufactured or synthesized.

An interesting part of this whole experiment is the progress that has been made in the creation of antimatter and also in how to retain and control it, which is not easy at all, an atom of antimatter when it comes into contact with another atom of normal matter is annihilated. , both are annihilated and automatically transformed into energy with 100% efficiency, approximately half a gram of antimatter would generate as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, which has about 21 kilotons.

But do not think that antimatter can be used as a source of energy, producing it takes a long time and is currently extremely expensive according to CERN itself, a few billionths of a gram costs several hundred million euros, perhaps in the future it can be manufactured , but at the moment we do not know how to do it profitably and, above all, safely.

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