Kind of old but didn't see topic posted before. Seems the sun creates antimatter
Antimatter has tremendous energy potential, if it could ever be harnessed. A solar flare in July 2002 created about a pound of antimatter, or half a kilo, according to new NASA-led research. That's enough to power the United States for two days
@General Brock
You really scare me.
Recently i've asked some of my fellow students about antimatter.
Some even didnt know that it exists and some thought i just made a joke.
That scared me even more
Well, I like to think I am educated, with passable science knowledge. I've read about antimatter in Sci Fi and, I think, in Discover Mag a couple of times, dealing with theoretical techs. I might even have skimmed it in a physics text in HS; I just forgot, or it never stuck, as something real, as opposed to something hypothetical.
So, between not being a physics buff, and the predominant exposure coming from lots of Sci Fi and very little pop sci, I got the wrong impression as to the realness of antimatter.
I never thought transporter tech or phasers could be real; I suppose the suspension of belief wires got crossed along the way with antimatter as well.
If you want to write something scientific about antimatter and you already dont know about it, you should add some explanation how antimatter differs from matter. Here are some links with simple information about the particle zoo:
General Brock wrote:Interesting. I never really thought antimatter existed defintively in real life; I only encountered the word in Sci Fi.
E=mc^2
Solving for m;
m=E/(c^2)
As I uderstand the 'm' will be in the form of anti-matter, and not matter.*
*Source; Millennial Project
Η ζωή, η ζωή εδω τελειώνει!
"Science is one cold-hearted bitch with a 14" strap-on" - Masuka 'Dexter'
"Angela is not the woman you think she is Gabriel, she's done terrible things"
"So have I, and I'm going to do them all to you." - Sylar to Arthur 'Heroes'
General Brock wrote:Interesting. I never really thought antimatter existed defintively in real life; I only encountered the word in Sci Fi.
Try spending some time with a cloud chamber.
If it has a magnet, and you are lucky, you might see an electron-antielectron pair (two traces that start at the same point and spiral quickly in opposite directions).
"This is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind against me!" - Bender (Futurama)
"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)
"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)
If memory serves, antimatter's been spotted as it's emitted from AGN jets. If that's the case, this discovery's not too surprising, considering the energy involved.
As the article notes, a/m is used in medical diagnostic technology. I wonder if we'd be able to eventually create enough for power generation, though a lot of power is needed to create appreciable amounts, IIRC. Assuming the engineers responsible for running the power plants are more competent than SF engineers, anyway.
As I uderstand the 'm' will be in the form of anti-matter, and not matter.*
*Source; Millennial Project
No, it will be 50% matter and 50% anti-matter, in order to preserve charge. That's how I understood it, anyhow. And I heard that there was some assymmetry too, so it won't be exactly 50%, which would be reason as to why there seem to be much more matter than antimatter in the universe today.
"Nippon ichi, bitches! Boing-boing." Mai smote the demonic fires of heck...
Matt Huang wrote:there's an alternate explanation that there is equal amounts of m & am, but the reaction pressure drives the two apart as soon as they meet. Kind of like how a drop of water will skitter over the surface of a very hot skillet instead of vaporizing instantly.
The Leidenfrost effect may be neat, but it can't really account for this in an isotropic universe. It may work if there is some sort of preference in direction or some other reactive asymmetry in the iteraction of matter and anti-matter; otherwise both matter and antimatter would be subject to the same effect, so on the large scale, they would cancel out. I guess the only thing that can be said is that if there is no asymettry in antimatter production, then there must be some other asymmetry that explains this (in how they react, non-isotropy of the universe, etc.). It may be too hasty to dismiss those possibilities automatically (there are string theories that have built-in directional preference in regards to the speed of light, for example, and are not completely isotropic, but I'm uncertain how this would affect matter/antimatter reactions), but they are still quite a bit uglier as solutions.
The sun produces anti-matter as part of fusion: a pair of positrons are given out (anti-beta radiation?) during the process.
Near the Galactic Core, the Great Annihilator spews out positrons by the bucketload and sounds like a B-movie villain.
We've made quite a few anti-protons, positrons and assorted weird anti-stuff (anti-neutrinos etc.) but only about 11 atoms of anti-hydrogen as I recall. It's real, but not in huge amounts.
According to wikipedia, "the Mohorovičić discontinuity is the boundary between the Earth's crust and the mantle."
According to Starbound, it's a problem solvable with enough combat drugs to turn you into the Incredible Hulk.
Η ζωή, η ζωή εδω τελειώνει!
"Science is one cold-hearted bitch with a 14" strap-on" - Masuka 'Dexter'
"Angela is not the woman you think she is Gabriel, she's done terrible things"
"So have I, and I'm going to do them all to you." - Sylar to Arthur 'Heroes'
We've made quite a few anti-protons, positrons and assorted weird anti-stuff (anti-neutrinos etc.) but only about 11 atoms of anti-hydrogen as I recall. It's real, but not in huge amounts.
During a year-long period between 1997 and 1998, FNAL produced 1 ng of antiprotons.
This was done in the midst of a very large experimental program which did not have sufficient
funds to run 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. The instantaneous production rates were
around 10E11 antiprotons/hour, so a full year of operation would have produced 8.8 x 10E14
antiprotons.
