My first post in a long time (Sorry Guys).
Today, I will be talking about antimatter which is the "opposite" of
matter per say.
Before we go into antimatter, lets look into
what matter is made of. Matter is made of 'atoms and molecules' which contain
protons, neutrons and electrons. These are made up of different kind of quarks
such as up quark, down quark and strange quark to name a few. So technically,
we can say that matter is made of particles such as quarks.
Anti-particles are basically particles which
have the same magnitude for their properties but have the opposite sign for the
specific elementary particle. For example, a positron has a charge of +1e
with the same mass of an electron and is therefore considered as the
antiparticle of the electron.
Matter and antimatter are said to annihilate
(completely) into energy if they come in contact. For example, let's say a mass of 10kg antimatter is coming towards
earth. When the antimatter comes in contact with
earth(made of matter) 10kg of earth will be destroyed along with 10kg of
antimatter and energy will be generated. This energy can be calculated by the
formula e = mc^2. Of course this implies that in this scenario, 9 * 10^17J of
energy (which is a very huge amount) will be produced along with
the annihilation of both the matter and the antimatter.
Radioactive rays are also released but that is a topic for another day.
Currently many scientists are trying to find a way to store matter however it cannot be stored in a container as the result would be annihilation. Therefore, some scientists are trying to use magnetic and electric fields as the antimatter containers instead however success is limited.
Thanks guys and more will be coming soon on a variety of astronomy topics.
