An international team of scientists -- including a group from Texas A&M University -- has made a discovery that could alter the way we understand physics.
Researchers used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., to create a new form of antimatter that they believe was present in the first billionth of a second immediately following the Big Bang.
Ten members of the A&M Cyclotron Institute -- a phyics-based research organization supported by the Department of Energy -- were involved in the discovery. They were Carl Gagliardi, Saskia Mioduszewski, Robert Tribble, Matthew Cervantes, Rory Clarke, Martin Codrington, Pibero Djawotho, James Drachenberg, Ahmed Hamed and Liaoyuan Huo.
To make the discovery, physicists collided particles of gold traveling at 186,000 miles per second, which is nearly the speed of light. The process was repeated more than 100 million times for researchers to collect a sufficient amount of data.
"By accelerating the gold at extremely high speeds, we were able to replicate the conditions right after the Big Bang. It's very much like when two cars collide at high speeds -- you would have a lot of hot metal," Gagliardi said. "At a temperature of about two trillion degrees, which is about 100,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, we were able to produce a new form of matter."
It is believed an equal amount of matter -- everything that can be seen in the universe -- and antimatter was created after the Big Bang, but any evidence of the latter disappeared in less than a second, he said.
By studying the new form of matter, researchers hope to better understand the forces at work in the universe.
"This enables us to see things we have never seen before," Gagliardi said.
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