Scientists believe they are one step closer to solving the riddle of how anything comes into existence with the help of an unprecedented global investigation. Two giant neutrino experiments in Japan and the United States have collected years of data to enable teams to predict with greater precision than ever before how “ghost particles” work and mutate. The milestone physical experience, described this week in Nature, brings physicists to the brink of a clearer understanding of why the Big Bang wiped out antimatter while allowing matter to exist, and it holds promise for ultimately unraveling the mystery of why our universe exists.

Global neutrino breakthrough strengthens clues as to why matter survived in the early universe. As Nature reports, the teams behind Japan’s T2K experiment and the US-based NOVA project merged more than a decade of data to explore how neutrino “flavor” changes during long-distance travel. The collaboration, working with hundreds of scientists globally, said this holistic approach provided findings that no single experiment could, but it also increased confidence that neutrinos change flavors and that they travel differently than their antimatter opposites.

For a long time, scientists have thought they might be the solution to why the universe made matter a winner. While neutrinos and antineutrinos responded differently to CP violation, they may have helped avoid fatal collapse during the Big Bang. Despite the fact that the results are not definitive, the research represents vastly improved accuracy and sets the stage for future missions.

The teams will continue to collect data to test whether neutrinos do indeed violate symmetry. If confirmed, it could rewrite physics and explain why our universe exists.