I’ve tried reading up on it but my brain can’t comprehend the concept of matter having an opposite. Like… if it’s the opposite of matter then it just wouldn’t exist?
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You know how, in math, when you combine 1 and -1 you get 0?
Antimatter is identical to regular matter in almost every way, *except* that its charges are opposite. For instance, electric charge. An anti-proton will behave very very similarly to a proton, to the point where you can even have anti-hydrogen atoms.
If you combined a proton and an anti-proton, all of their charges would sum to zero. This has the odd side effect that they will annihilate one another and release a ton of energy.
Antimatter is currently very rare in our universe and we’re trying to figure out why. Normally matter and antimatter form side by side, and so there should be the same amount of each, but there clearly isn’t very much antimatter and a lot of regular matter. We’re still running tests to see if we can find out what makes them different enough that one is everywhere and the other is scarce.
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