All About Space

Where did the antimatter go?

It was destroyed after the Big Bang

- Dr Aihong Tang, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York

Antimatter and matter are supposed to be created in comparable abundance. However, almost all matter observed from Earth seems to be made of matter rather than antimatter. Where did the antimatter go? Antimatter was either destroyed within a second after its creation in the Big Bang, or the Big Bang made antimatter in a distant universe that is far beyond our reach and our visible world happens to be in a matter zone. The first possibilit­y could be caused by a possible tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and it is being studied by accelerato­r experiment­s. The second possibilit­y is being explored by balloon and space-based experiment­s – a recent famous one is the AMS-02 experiment mounted on the Internatio­nal Space Station. In those experiment­s, scientists are looking for tiny fragments of primordial antimatter in cosmic rays.

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