The newly found antiparticle, called antihyper hydrogen-4, could have a potential imbalance with its matter counterpart that may help scientists understand how our universe came to be.
Why in the News?
Antihyper Hydrogen-4 is made up of an antiproton, two antineutrons and one antihyperon (a baryon that contains a strange quark).
Physicists found traces of this antimatter among particle tracks from 6 billion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Key findings:
Both hyperhydrogen-4 and its antimatter counterpart antihyper hydrogen-4 seem to wink out of existence very quickly.
The physicists didn't find a significant difference between their lifetimes.
The scientists' next step will be to compare the masses of the antiparticles and their particle opposites, which they hope could reveal some clues as to how our matter-heavy universe came to be.
Antimatter: Except for having opposite electric charges, antimatter has the same properties as matter, same mass, same lifetime before decaying and same interactions.
What is Antiparticle?
It is a subatomic particle that has the same mass as another particle and equal but opposite values of some other properties. Example- The antiparticle of the electron is the positron.
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