Where is the Antimatter - UPDATE

The Fermilab today released some preliminary findings of a particle reaction that produces slightly more matter than antimatter, possible explaining why there is so much matter in the visible Universe but no antimatter.

In nature there are two types of massive particle, dubbed by scientists as matter and antimatter. When the two meet they destroy each other and convert their masses to pure energy. And in every experiment conducted thus far, they are produced and destroyed in exactly equal amounts - there is no known way to make matter without making antimatter.

Except if that were true in nature, than every star in every galaxy we see would have been destroyed a long time ago. (Unless of course there is an unknown mechanism for separating the two into different regions of the Universe, but this has never been seen either).

So where is all the antimatter?

What Fermilab appears to have observed is a reaction where very slightly more matter is produced than antimatter - it seems to be less than a 1% difference. But if that is true, then the Universe could have used the same process to generate the matter excess.

Of course those are very preliminary results and could very easily be an experimental error or anomaly. It will take a lot more data before we can be sure that they have discovered something interesting...