It’s official: Antimatter falls down, not up.
The study confirms a pillar of Einstein’s general theory of relativity known as the weak equivalence principle. According to that principle, gravity pulls on every object in the same way, no matter what it’s made of. “This concept is at the heart of our comprehension of gravitation,” says physicist Ruggero Caravita, who was not involved with the new work.
Antimatter is the mirror image of matter, carrying the opposite electric charge but the same mass. An electron’s antiparticle, for example, is a positively charged particle called a positron. A proton’s alter ego is a negatively charged antiproton, and so on.
Most physicists didn’t seriously entertain the idea that antimatter could fall up instead of down, says Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark. But scientists had never been able to directly test it before. “Antimatter is kind of mysterious … so we want to actually confirm that behavior,” says Hangst, who is the spokesperson for the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus, or ALPHA, collaboration, which reported the new result.
2023-09-27 10:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org
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