Babar the elephant is helping scientists in Oxfordshire explain the mystery of the universe.

The boffins want to know why there is enough matter in the universe to create planets, stars, galaxies and much more besides.

Physicists calculate that equal quantities of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang 15 billion years ago. When the two materials meet, they should disappear, cancelling each other out and forming pure energy.

They know this process did occur, because today's universe is awash with this energy - known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. But scientists are baffled as to why all the anti-matter has gone while huge amounts of matter remain. Now, scientists from ten countries have joined forces in California to use BaBar, a 1,200-tonne detector that takes its name from the storybook elephant and the B particles (matter) and B-bar particles (anti-matter) it will study.

Prof Ken Peach, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Chilton, near Didcot, said: "We hope to see the tiny differences in behaviour between matter and anti-matter which will explain the huge imbalance in the universe. "Until today we haven't been able to create enough particles to see this effect, or had detectors able to record sufficient detail. BaBar offers us a fantastic opportunity to take a huge step forward in our understanding of our universe."

The particles BaBar will study exist for only one thousand-billionth of a second, so the device is fantastically complex, consisting of detectors arranged in layers around its axis.

More than 50 British scientists were involved in its development, contributing £8m worth of British components. The total experiment will cost £186m.

Story date: Thursday 20 May

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