this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Physics

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It's Official, Antimatter Falls Down in Gravity, Not Up (www.nature.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Since the discovery of antimatter decades ago, particle physicists have wondered if these particles were repulsed by gravity. Einstein predicted that despite having opposite charges to its regular matter counterparts, antimatter should still behave like matter does concerning gravity. This has been tricky to confirm experimentally since it's hard to make enough antimatter to observe its behavior. Particle physicists have finally pulled it off, using the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN, generating antihydrogen atoms and then dropping them in a 3-meter tall vertical shaft.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

how come such seemingly fundamental facts aren’t/weren’t known when there are so many really smart and dedicated people studying physics?

Common sense and theories told us antimatter falls down. But it's hard to actually run the experiment. That's the new part.