The Globe this morning ran an AP story about team of scientists based in Europe that announced the group has trapped the first “antiatom.”
An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to create an atom of antihydrogen and then hold onto it long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab….
For decades, researchers have wondered why antimatter seems to have disappeared from the universe.
Theory posits that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the moment of the big bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. But while matter — defined as having mass and taking up space — went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has disappeared, except in the lab…
(The) ALPHA team beat the rival ATRAP team led by Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse, who nevertheless welcomed the result.
“The atoms that were trapped were not yet trapped very long and in a very usable number, but one has to crawl before you sprint,’ he said.