What is antimatter?
In: Physics
Matter is made of atoms. Antimatter is made up of the topsy turvy version of atoms.
Atoms have positive parts and negative parts, so you swap the positive and negative **(technically there are neutral parts for both atoms and anti atoms. The neutral parts are made up of even smaller parts that come in normal and anti varieties with opposite charges, but lets ignore that for simplicity)** and you get an opposite day atom! That is antimatter.
If a normal atom and an opposite day atom touch, they will wipe each other out and release a lot of energy.
A single hydrogen atom touching a single anti hydrogen atom creates a spark visible to the naked eye.
It’s like what we think of as normal matter. The difference is that the electrical charge is the opposite.
Atoms have got electrons in them. Electrons have a certain mass (9.11×10^-31kg) and a certain negative electrical charge. The first antimatter particle discovered was something called the position. This particle was found to have the exact same mass as an electron. It was also found to have the same amount of charge as an electron, but it had a *positive* charge instead of the electron’s *negative* charge.
Other antiparticles exist too, and these are just like that. They have then same properties as the ‘normal’ ones but with the opposite electrical charge.
It is a mirrored version of matter with opposite charged and compositional components to electrons protons and neutrons. If the anti matter variant of hydrogen touches a normal matter hydrogen atom they will completely convert into energy with no parts of either remaining.
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