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Kamioka Observatory/ ICRR/ Uni Tokyo
The Super Kamiokande detector consists of a cylindrical steel tank holding 50,000 tonnes of cleansed water. The detector wall is covered in photo-sensors known as photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs).
Stars, galaxies, worlds, pretty much everything that makes up our daily lives owes its existence to a cosmic peculiarity.
The nature of this quirk, which allowed matter to dominate the Universe at the expense of antimatter, remains a mystery.
Now, arises from an experiment in Japan could assist researchers solve the puzzle – one of the most significant in science.
It depends upon a difference in the method matter and antimatter particles act.
The world that recognizes to us – consisting of all the daily objects we can touch – is comprised of matter. The fundamental foundation of matter are sub-atomic particles, such as electrons, quarks and neutrinos.
However matter has a shadowy counterpart called antimatter. Each sub-atomic particle of ordinary matter has a corresponding “antiparticle”.
Today, there is much more matter than antimatter in deep space. It wasn’t always this way.
The Big Bang need to have developed matter and antimatter in equal quantities.
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ESA/ Planck collaboration
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is often described as the “afterglow” of the Big Bang.
” When particle physicists make brand-new particles in accelerators, they always find that they produce particle-antiparticle pairs: for every single unfavorable electron, a favorably charged positron (the electron’s antimatter counterpart),” said Prof Lee Thompson from the University of Sheffield, a member of the 350- strong T2K collaboration, which includes a fairly large number of scientists from UK universities.
” So why isn’t deep space 50%antimatter? This is a long-standing issue in cosmology – what took place to the antimatter?”
Nevertheless, when a matter particle meets its antiparticle, they “annihi