The hunt for antimatter galaxies will be on this summer from the International Space Station when STS-134 Endeavour delievers the $1.5 billion cosmic ray detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer--or AMS-02 (audio) to orbit now slated for July 29, 2010.
In the meantime, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer needs to go through more testing and verification before its mission begins to search for unusual matter in the universe, such as cosmic rays, dark matter, and matter and antimatter. The testing will continue in Europe over the next several weeks prior to shipment to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida for the planned July launch.
The AMS will also analyze, during its space mission, how the universe began and evolved over its approximate 13.7 billion years of existence.
In addition to sensing distant galaxies made entirely of antimatter, the AMS will also test leading theories of dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that comprises 83 percent of the matter in the universe. And it will search for strangelets, a theoretical form of matter that's ultra-massive because it contains so-called strange quarks. Better understanding of strangelets will help scientists to study microquasars and tiny, primordial black holes as they evaporate, thus proving whether these small black holes even exist (French and German TV reports).
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