In a single collision of gold nuclei at the RHIC particle accelerator, many hundreds of particles are emitted.The particles leave telltale tracks in the STAR detector (shown here from the end and side).
Scientists analysed about a hundred million collisions to spot the new antinuclei, identified via their characteristic decay into a light isotope of antihelium and a positive pi-meson. Altogether, 70 examples of the new antinucleus were found. Credit: BNL
Scientists have created a never-before seen type of exotic matter that is thought to have been present at the earliest stages of the universe, right after the Big Bang.
The new matter is a particularly weird form of antimatter, which is like a mirror-image of regular matter. Every normal particle is thought to have an antimatter partner, and if the two come into contact, they annihilate.
The recent feat of matter-tinkering was accomplished by smashing charged gold atoms at each other at super-high speeds in a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.
Among the many particles that resulted from this crash were bizarre objects called anti-hypertritons. Not only are these things antimatter, but they're also what's called strange matter. Where normal atomic nuclei are made of protons and neutrons (which are made of "up" quarks and "down" quarks), strange nuclei also have so-called Lambda particles that contain another flavour of quark called "strange" as well. These Lambda particles orbit around the protons and neutrons.
If all that is a little much to straighten out, just think of anti-hypertritons as several kinds of weird.
Though they normally don't exist on Earth, these particles may be hiding in the universe in very hot, dense places like the centers of some stars, and most likely were around when the universe was extremely young and energetic, and all the matter was packed into a very small, sweltering space.
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