CERN needs your help to analyse experimental results to figure out how antimatter is affected by gravity. You can help us better understand the Universe and, just maybe, prove Einstein wrong...
The observable Universe is composed almost entirely of matter but we can produce stuff called antimatter in the lab. Antimatter is material composed of antiparticles. So for example, a positron (the antiparticle of an electron) combines with an antiproton to form an antihydrogen atom.
Antiparticles have the same mass as normal matter particles but the opposite charge. When an antiparticle collides with an ordinary matter particle they both obliterate to emit radiation and some other particles - this is called annihilation.
Because of Einstein's principle of energy-matter equivalence (E = mc2) antiparticles should interact gravitationally just like particles of ordinary matter - and that's what scientist's expect to observe - but if they don't then Einstein was wrong...
The Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy (AEGiS) experiment at CERN collides hydrogen atoms with antihydrogen atoms.
On collision the hydrogen and antihydrogen annihilate to produce mostly pions and some other particles - which we'll call starburst.
The starburst travel through a special gel called an emulsion and we can see its tracks. If we trace these tracks to their point of origin then we know exactly where annihilation occurred.
Then as we know the starting position of the antiparticles, the distance they travelled to the point of annihilation and how much they dropped - we can work out how far the antiparticle fell during its journey.
Then we can figure out how antimatter interacts gravitationally.
If you want to help us finding antimatter tracks go to this link and start reporting tracks!
If you want to help us with the code, just clone the repository and send us pull request!
You can check also some more info about the project in this Mozilla Webmaker Movie.