Antimatter Created to Test Theory on Universe

Scientists say they have created enough antihydrogen--a type of the mirror-image antimatter that fictionally powers spaceships on “Star Trek”--to test a widely held basic model of the universe.

Although antihydrogen has been made before, the more than 50,000 atoms created at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva are “by far the most produced,” said Jeffrey Hangst, a leader of the ATHENA collaboration, one of two groups of physicists working on antihydrogen at CERN.

The quest to understand and manipulate antimatter is one of science’s most competitive pursuits.

ATHENA researchers, whose work appeared in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, plan to make more antihydrogen to test the Standard Model, equations that explain the nature of matter and energy. If the antihydrogen doesn’t behave the same as normal hydrogen, “the textbooks would have to be rewritten,” said Hangst, a physicist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Antimatter is the mirror image of conventional matter with opposite properties. Antimatter is destroyed whenever it collides with matter, turning both into bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Scientists believe this process was crucial to the creation of the universe.