Telegraph: Scientists soon to find out why our universe exists.

Telegraph - For years it has been a staple of science fiction, familiar to Star Trek fans as the driving force behind the SS Enterprise.

But now groundbreaking experiments on particles of mysterious "antimatter" could back up decades' worth of scientific theories and answer fundamental questions like why our universe exists.
A team of British researchers and international colleagues based at the Cern lab in Switzerland announced they have been able to manipulate an "antihydrogen" atom for the first time.
The experiment, in which the scientists painstakingly trapped elusive antiatoms one by one and probed them with microwaves, resulted in them making a tiny "jump".
The study, reported in the Nature journal, is the first to successfully interact with an antimatter atom and creates hope that scientists will be able to learn more about its properties.
According to scientific theories, every type of matter in the universe created after the big bang should have been accompanied by equal amounts of antimatter, a mirror substance which is identical in structure but has the direct opposite properties.

The problem with the theory is that when atoms of matter meet with their corresponding antimatter both are immediately destroyed, creating the puzzle of why anything in the universe is able to exist at all.
The answer, researchers believe, is that subtle differences exist between the two states of matter which resulted in the matter which makes up our universe outlasting or outnumbering antimatter and wiping it out.
Because antimatter is destroyed by matter immediately after it is created, researchers need to "trap" it in a vacuum - a feat they first achieved last summer - to enable them to study it for a few precious minutes
By doing so they hope to shed light on the differences that make the universe exist in the state that it does.
Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the team, said: "We’ve demonstrated that we can probe the internal structure of the antihydrogen atom and we’re very excited about that. We now know that it’s possible to design experiments to make detailed measurements of antiatoms.
“Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and we understand its structure extremely well. Now we can finally begin to coax the truth out of antihydrogen. Are they different? We can confidently say that time will tell.”