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
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