Researchers were able to sort out a long-puzzled-over matter mystery with some help from the sun.
The scientists have detected antimatter in solar flares using magnetic-field and microwave data, according to a New Jersey Institute of Technology press release.
The research gives some insight into the strange asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Antiparticles can be created and detected using particle-accelerator experiments, but these are complicated and costly. It is nearly impossible to study particles that have not been create by an accelerator.
A team of researchers have broken new ground by conducting the "first remote detection of relativistic antiparticles," called positrons.
The antiparticles were detected in "nuclear interactions of accelerated ions in solar flares through the analysis of readily available microwave and magnetic-field data obtained from solar-dedicated facilities and spacecraft."
The team hopes this discovery will lead the way for future scientists to detect more relativistic antiparticles around the sun and other astrophysical objects using radio-telescope observation. Further study of solar antiparticles could lead to a better understanding of high-energy processes such as flares.
Electrons and positrons work in a matter-antimatter harmony. They have identical physical behavior, except for the fact that electrons have a negative charge while positrons have the opposite.
The difference causes positrons to emit the "opposite sense of circularly polarized radio emission," which is what distinguished them from each other.
In order to identify the opposite positrons the research team used two frequencies of radio images from Japan's Nobeyama Radioheliograph.
The scientists found the found the "radio emission from the flare was polarized in the normal sense (due to more numerous electrons) at the lower frequency (lower energy) where the effect of positrons is expected to be small, but reversed to the opposite sense at the same location, although at the higher frequency (higher energy) where positrons can dominate."
The work was presented at the 44th meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division by y NJIT Research Professor of Physics Gregory D. Fleishman and two co-researchers.
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