It was created in equal abundance to normal matter at the beginning of the universe, but was destroyed when it came in contact with the normal matter and is now primarily the subject of fiction: the material that powers the starship Enterprise, the bomb beneath the Vatican in the novel "Angels & Demons," and so on.Very small amounts have been produced by powerful particle accelerators including CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, but can be captured for only fractions of a second. "Some indirect evidence in the past suggested that antimatter might be emitted by lightning, added electrical engineer Steven Cummer of Duke University , who studies lightning and the radio emissions from it. It illustrates the amazing things that thunderstorms can do. When a gamma ray with the right amount of energy interacts with an air atom, energy from the gamma ray is converted into matter, one electron and one positron, lightning expert Joseph Dwyer said yesterday during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. " said physicist Joseph R. Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne , Fla., a coauthor of a paper about the findings that is scheduled to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. But one event, on Dec. 14, 2009, occurred when Fermi was over Egypt and the nearest active storm was in Zambia, about 2,800 miles to the south and well below the satellite's horizon.But the spacecraft was connected to the storm by the Earth's magnetic field, Dwyer said. "What's interesting, Cummer added, "is if we take what we know is happening and calculate how much antimatter might be produced, it's quite a bit less than what was observed…. "We really don't understand a lot of the details about how lighting works," he said.
– Scientists have been amazed to discover that thunderstorms on Earth send bursts of antimatter into space. The phenomenon was spotted by NASA researchers using the Fermi space telescope, the Los Angeles Times reports. Scientists at CERN have only been able to produce antimatter—the mirror image of matter, with the components of its atoms in reverse—in tiny amounts for a fraction of a second. "This is a fundamental new discovery about how our planet works," a lightning researcher tells National Geographic. "The idea that any planet has thunderstorms that can create antimatter and launch it into space is something out of science fiction. The fact that our own planet is doing it is truly amazing."