14 DAY TRIAL // Physicists around the world are now hoping that a new generation of neutrino telescopes being built at the South Pole may help them determine which way antimatter will fall when released.
That is to say, particle physicists are still unsure as to whether releasing a hypothetical piece of antimatter above Earth's surface would make the material fall towards or get rejected by the planet.
The influence of gravity on antimatter is still something that is being heatedly debated in the international scientific community, but no consensus is currently in sight.
Scientists believe that telescopes such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is currently being built at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, could hold the key to clearing this mystery.
The main hope is actually that these high-tech facilities will be able to detect the telltale signs of antimatter's presence, Technology Review reports.
The thing that drives experts crazy is the fact that they have been trying to make sense of this conundrum for many years, by conducting a large number of experiments.
Unfortunately, results obtained thus far have been classified as inconclusive. But physicist Dragan Hajdukovic believes that the IceCube may provide scientists with the answers they are looking for.
The expert is based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the same organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
The expert believes that while detecting matter-antimatter pairs may be difficult in regular gravitational fields, the situation may change entirely inside a black hole.
These celestial bodies are blobs of matter that are so compressed and crush that a single teaspoon of material taken from their interior would weigh billions of tons.
The black holes therefore generate impressively strong magnetic and gravitational fields, which bend space, time, and light, and draw in everything around.
What Hajdukovic is proposing is that the gravitational field inside black holes is large enough to allow for the formation of observable neutrino-antineutrino pairs.
The experiment that follows is rather simple. Given that matter cannot escape from a black hole, experts observing such a structure should see none of the stuff.
However, the effects of gravity on antimatter have not yet been established. Therefore, if gravity is attracting antimatter, no antineutrinos will be seen exiting the black hole.
Conversely, if gravity repels antimatter, then antineutrinos should be observed as they are violently being ejected out of black holes.
In other words, the dark behemoths should be immensely large sources of antineutrinos, if the second case is the valid one.
The central regions of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies therefore provide ideal observation targets for neutrino observatories such as IceCube, which is scheduled for completion by 2011.