what is anti-matter? And how can it be used in future travel applications?
In: 5
ELI5. Anti matter are similar to their normal counterparts except they have opposite charges (or are made of quarks that have opposite charges). One of their characteristics is that when matter and anti matter particles collide, they annihilate each other releasing a lot of energy very efficiently.
How they can be used in travel is speculative and theoretical. Anti matter is hard to contain and control in any great quantity because nearly everything around it is matter which it cannot come into contact with or it goes poof! So it needs to be contained in a vacuum and some kind of strong magnetic field.
Assuming it can ever be generated, contained and controlled reliably, one way to use it is to manage a controlled annihilation with matter thereby releasing energy that can be used to propel some kind of craft. Very little (relatively speaking) would be needed to generate a lot of energy so, in theory, it would be very efficient.
Anti-matter is a substance that is the mirror image of normal matter. It has the same mass as normal matter, but all of its properties are reversed. For example, if a particle of anti-matter comes into contact with a particle of normal matter, they will annihilate each other and release a large amount of energy.
Anti-matter can be used in future travel applications by using it to power spacecraft. When Anti-matter comes into contact with matter, it releases a huge amount of energy. This energy can be harnessed to power spacecraft, making them much faster and more efficient than current technology allows.
I think the main thing preventing any research into the topic is the difficulty in obtaining antimatter. It’s currently only achievable from expensive and complicated procedures. So even if we could find a reliable form of propulsion from antimatter, it may remain moot because we would need an easy way to generate antimatter.
Anti-matter is the same as regular matter, but has the opposite charge. For example, an electron is negatively charged. It’s anti-matter counterpart, the positron, has a positive electric charge. Aside from that, there’s not much practical difference between the two. In other words, an antihydrogen molecule should be identically to regular counterpart. Like if you combined two of it with an antioxygen atom, you’d get anti-water. Which should behave like regular water.
Now, if you remember your grade school chemistry, opposite charges attract while like charges repel. A positron and an electron will attract each other, and when they collide, they “annihilate” each other. This matter then gets converted into energy. Usually in the form of other quantum particles like photons, because remember, matter cannot be created or destroyed.
Now, there’s a tremendous amount of energy in an atom. So if you can harness that, it would have limitless potential. Like running a nuclear reactor or powering a rocket. Per kilogram, the energy density of this fuel would be far higher than anything else we have, including nuclear fusion, which the sun uses. In theory, it could even be used to power an Alcubierre (warp) drive, like on Star Trek, if you had enough of it. (It’s still being heavily debated, but the math seems to work.) But you would need A LOT.
The problem is there’s very little natural anti-matter out there in the universe, and physicists don’t actually know why. According to our current understanding, Big Bang should have created equal parts regular and anti-matter. And they can’t have annihilated each other, because there’s still a ton of regular matter floating around. So, unfortunately, you can’t just mine it. Anti-matter can be manufactured in particle accelerators here on Earth, but it’s an expensive and energy intensive process, only resulting in a few atoms at a time. Not enough to actually be useful.
Latest Answers