Huh I didn’t know antimatter was a completely confirmed thing.
After making a thin gas of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, researchers pushed it up a 3-metre-tall vertical shaft surrounded by superconducting electromagnetic coils. These can create a kind of magnetic ‘tin can’ to keep the antimatter from coming into contact with matter and annihilating. Next, the researchers let some of the hotter antiatoms escape, so that the gas in the can got colder, down to just 0.5 °C above absolute zero — and the remaining antiatoms were moving slowly.
The researchers then gradually weakened the magnetic fields at the top and bottom of their trap — akin to removing the lid and base of the can — and detected the antiatoms using two sensors as they escaped and annihilated. When opening any gas container, the contents tend to expand in all directions, but in this case the antiatoms’ low velocities meant that gravity had an observable effect: most of them came out of the bottom opening, and only one-quarter out of the top.
You may have heard of a “PET scan” used in medicine. This uses a type of antimatter called a positron.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/positron-emission-tomography-antimatter-cancer/
Not only does it exist, but bananas give off a fair bit of antimatter due to their decaying potassium isotopes.
Allegedly, im not smart enough to verify it
Bananas produce antimatter, but just barely. The main radioactive material in bananas is Potassium-40. A banana is about 0.358% potassium in all. About 0.012% of naturally occurring potassium is the radioactive Potassium-40. Only 0.001% of all radioactive decay events in postassium-40 produce an antiparticle (a positron).
An average banana produces a single positron about every 75 minutes.
Antiprotons should be called negatons or negatrons
Hmm interesting. I wondered if it would be attracted or repelled by matter. It does annihilate when it comes in contact with mater, right?
The reason antimatter is “anti” is that an antiparticle has the opposite charge of its non-anti counterpart. Electrons have a negative charge, while their antiparticles, positrons have a positive charge. And since opposite charges attract, well, I think you can figure it out from there.
And yes, matter/antimatter interactions result in annihilation.
What exactly does “annihilation” mean in this context. Do both “atoms” give off energy and convert to sub atomic particles? Does one atom kind of “win” over the other and undergo fission instead of complete annihilation?
At this tiny scale, energy and mass are essentially equivalent. So when we say that matter annihilates, we mean that they transform into pure energy (in this case, as photons of light). They don’t break into subatomic particles, because that still counts as mass. They just simply cease to exist.
As a side note, the “conversion rate” of mass into energy (and vice versa) is governed by Einstein’s E=mc^2. All this equation means is that it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to create a small amount of mass, and vice versa, it only takes a small amount of mass to create a ridiculous amount of energy. Because antimatter annihilates completely (ie, 100% of its mass, as well as 100% of the regular matter’s mass, gets converted into energy), antimatter is currently the most explosive thing known to mankind
For the simple case of electron-positron annihilation, they transform into high-energy photons, whose total energy is equal to the total mass-energy of the electron and positron. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron–positron_annihilation
While atoms can be comprised of antimatter the interactions are generally on a subatomic level, i.e. electron/positron, and proton/antiproton. Since particles/antiparticles are identical to their counterparts aside from charge any such interactions are total with nothing left over other than the resulting energy release usually in the form of photons. The results of an atom reacting with an anti-atom could have a variety of results depending on the differences in weight between the two. Exactly what those results might be is a bit beyond my lay-understanding of the process.
Isn’t “falling up” just another way of saying that it’s repelled by matter?
But from the antimatter’s perspective, it falls up.
So then it is not really antimatter in the sense that it is completely opposite?
So antimatter still has positive mass?
In my limited understanding, antimatter just means the particles have the opposite charge of normal matter. All other attributes are not part of the definition of antimatter.
Charge isn’t the right word, although I’m not sure what the right word is. Otherwise you’ve got it right.
No, charge is the right word. But i was wrong about charge being the only difference, apparently antimatter’s “parity” and “time” are also opposite of normal matter. Whatever that means.
