When summer comes to Antarctica this December, a group of physicists there will launch an enormous balloon carrying a scientific instrument through Earth’s atmosphere to the edge of space. If all goes well, the detector will count cosmic rays for 20 days. The researchers hope to find among those rays, evidence of galaxies that are millions of light-years away and made entirely of antimatter.
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The idea may sound far-fetched, but antimatter regions of the universe wouldn’t contradict any laws of physics. In fact, such antigalaxies would address one of the great unanswered questions of cosmology—why the Big Bang seems to have produced more matter than antimatter.