what is antimatter? Does it exist? How does it matter to us?
In: Physics
Regular matter consists of the particles that most people have heard of: electrons, protons, neutrons (the latter two consisting of quarks). These make up atoms, molecules and so on.
Antimatter works exactly the same way, however the particles have an inverted charge. While an electron has a negative charge, an anti-electron (called positron) has positive charge. And while a proton has positive charge, an anti-proton has negative charge. Other than that antimatter can build atoms, melocules etc. just like regular matter
When matter and anti-matter touch, they annihilate each other, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.
Antimatter is real and it can actually be synthesized in really tiny amounts using large quantities of energy, or it can be created in radioactive decay. However in the environment around us we basically see no meaningful amounts of antimatter at all. To my knowledge, physics has not found out yet why the universe around us is made of matter instead of antimatter.
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