A blast wave unleashes a large amount of energy that causes changes in pressure and temperature along its path. Or would it be similar to a Fat Man Bomb? For more information, please see our None. Cookie Notice The universe began to cool and then expand. At the moment of the Big Bang, all the energy of the Universe was concentrated and exploded. We could make this happen if we work at it. (Some say that this was adapted into the show based on people who knew Miguel Alcubierre and they put his unpunished theories into the show, but I don't think this was ever confirmed), But there are volumes of Star Trek Tech manuals that base other things "kind of" around science, or at least attempt to, like the Heisenberg Compensation in the Transporters. $\begingroup$ For shooting it through the air: you need to have some kind of containment anyway and a single gram of antimatter-matter annihilation is like an atombomb going off so you dont need much. For that you can recreate the meteor that made the dinosaurs extinct (100 trillion tons of TNT) with about two tons of antimatter in one spot. However, humans have produced only a minuscule amount of antimatter. For a spherical blast wave, the change in pressure is: The above equation is known as the modified Friedlander equation, and it is used to calculate the change in pressure over time. TNT equivalent - Wikipedia Space Mechs or Tanks or Planes or Marines - Fighting in space without blowing up each other's starships. 10 grams of antimatter will annihilate 10 g matter, which just produces 429.6 kT. Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987? Current technology only allows us to store small amounts of antimatter in each Penning trap. The NIAC is currently researching antimatter powered spaceships, and according to NASA it looks promising. Did you get it? @Serban Tanasa: No, it's clearly not the same question. Ah yes, the multi-million dollar question. The energy released by a hurricane per day during condensation. 2014 The Institute of Makers of Explosives. "One particle is left over out of a billion, and this one particle out of a billion is everything we see in the Universe. The results of this latest experiment show that a property of the antiproton (called its magnetic moment) is identical in magnitude to the magnetic moment of its proton counterpart to within a precision of just a couple of parts per billion. A typical blast wave has a high-pressure jump, which denotes the wavefront. Many people have proposed that we disarm all nuclear weapons to make the world safer. Since after the Big Bang there was nothing left but matter and antimatter in equal amounts, they should have annihilated everything. Lesser known is its role in studying the anti-particles of the Universe. Antimatter Fuel - Atomic Rockets Professor Doser leads a team studying this strange, expensive, explosive stuffin the wonderfully named Antimatter Factory. The relative effectiveness factor (RE factor) relates an explosive's demolition power to that of TNT, in units of the TNT equivalent/kg (TNTe/kg). The Antimatter Bomb: Only Weapon More Powerful Than A Nuke The worlds most powerful nuke ever created was the Tsar Bomba. Convert that into mass using $E=mc^2$ and we get $8.13710^6 kg$ divide by 2 because half that mass is coming from regular matter and we have $4.06910^6 kg$. Taken shamelessly from my previous answer here. Antimatter: how the world's most expensive and explosive - ABC This is not the first time Big Bang thinking has led to the conclusion that the universe shouldnt exist. The ton of TNT is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be 4.184 gigajoules, [1] which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of TNT. It doesn't sound like it should be real, but "it does exist", says Professor Doser,a physicist who studies the properties of antimatterat CERN,the European Council for Nuclear Research. After a bit of number crunching that means agram of antiprotonantimatter would cost an absurd 5 quadrillion euros. [5], Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion proposes the use of antimatter as a "trigger"[6] to initiate small nuclear explosions; the explosions provide thrust to a spacecraft. Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. This wave leads to an abrupt increase in pressure. How explosive is Antimatter, Really? : r/AskPhysics - Reddit This means that even if a supposed Big Bang could somehow create a universe, that universe would forever remain devoid of matter, unlike the actual universe in which we live. You'll need a fair bit of antimatter, um, let's see 1 Mt is $4.1\times10^{15} J$ so the Tsar Bomba (in the tested config) at $42MT = 1.72 \times10^{17} J$ [9], But, even on this basis, comparing the actual energy yields of a large nuclear device and an explosion of TNT can be slightly inaccurate. "[When] a proton and antiproton annihilate each other, their mass completely disappears," Professor Dosersays. 1 gram of antimatter explosion radius. It is a spherical or hemispherical-shaped wave that originates upon the detonation of explosives. What if I had 1 anti-hydrogen atom or enough antimatter that's equal in "weight" to a hydrogen atom? But say I had 1 Antimatter Electron, and I just opened a container in a room, what would happen? One news report called the results of this experiment bizarre, illustrating the manner in which Big Bang thinking often taints the coverage of science reporting. Though one of the answer does say that we would need 1.3 trillion tonnes of antimatter to blow up the Earth. There are many hypothetical antimatter weapons, the most well known of which is the antimatter bomb. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. This makes it incredibly hard to store antimatter. How much energy is released? - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange Where can I find a clear diagram of the SPECK algorithm? Although submission of USGS form 9-4040-A is not mandatory, IME recommends that applicable mining operations submit the form to keep U.S. antiproliferation authorities informed. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. Everyone knows biking is fantastic, but only this Car vs. Bike Calculator turns biking hours into trees! When groups of people are asked to name the most expensive substance, the variety of answers is hilarious. When antimatter collides with matter it can end up creating the largest explosion in human history. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. I have no idea how to get that in an antimatter bomb, because of the fizzle problem noted above. CAUTION The RE factor is the relative mass of TNT to which an explosive is equivalent: The greater the RE, the more powerful the explosive. The damage done to the biosphere here is more due to pressure and heat than radioactivity. Supposed you have successfully build a special tomahawk missile entirely composed of antimatter, this method of conversion of mass to energy greatly dwarfs any conventional nuclear reactions. Unlike Big Bang speculation, these measurements, which are testable and repeatable, were real science. The positron has the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge, rather than negative. Sorin Bastea, Laurence E. Fried, Kurt R. Glaesemann, W. Michael Howard, P. Clark Souers, Peter A. Vitello, Cheetah 5.0 User's Manual, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2007. To create antimatter you just need to create matter. The solar irradiance on Earth every second. "Antimatter appears every single time matter appears," Professor Doser says. Can antimatter projectiles work as disintegration weapons? When a collision between a particle and its opposing antiparticle collide, both of them are annihilated which causes a massive release of energy, otherwise known as an explosion. The time of interaction is very short. I think this is a very conservative answer in that it is very certain to get the job done. When the antimatter starts reacting antiprotons and positrons will be kicked away, mixing with the air. For a 10 km dinosaur killer asteroid, 1 kg of antimatter should be sufficient retarget the asteroid -- actually quite a bit less would actually be needed because there are quite a few near earth objects that would need only a tiny orbital deflection to serve the purpose, the largest of these earth crossers, 1866 Sysyphus one of these objects With ANFO or ammonium nitrate, they would require 1.0/0.74 (or 1.35) kg or 1.0/0.32 (or 3.125) kg, respectively. For a fragmenting munition where public access is possible, the TNT explosion radius, DDD, is: This distance is different for the bare explosives. For Starship, using B9 and later, how will separation work if the Hydrualic Power Units are no longer needed for the TVC System? Where can I find a clear diagram of the SPECK algorithm? When a gnoll vampire assumes its hyena form, do its HP change? In other words, antimatter planets, antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies could be a thing. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion, "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons / Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", "Laser technique produces bevy of antimatter", "Details on antimatter triggered fusion bombs - NextBigFuture.com", "Angels & Demons: The Physics Behind The Movie (and The Book)", "Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons: Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order", Page discussing the possibility of using antimatter as a trigger for a thermonuclear explosion, Paper discussing the number of antiprotons required to ignite a thermonuclear weapon, Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments, Existential risk from artificial intelligence, Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday argument rebuttal, Self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal, List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events, List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antimatter_weapon&oldid=1139434888, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from August 2020, All articles needing additional references, Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2004, All articles containing potentially dated statements, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 15 February 2023, at 03:22. The explosive energy of a quantity of TNT of the. Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. "One 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter]costs as much as one kilogram of gold," he says. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184 kilojoules (or 4184 joules) of energy are released. 1 megaton is about 4.2x10 15 J. But other than this probably being impossible, it may just start the race for the antimatter bomb. But even this is insanely expensive for only one bullet. barrels of oil. What's the cheapest way to buy out a sibling's share of our parents house if I have no cash and want to pay less than the appraised value? Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. If the number of Short Tons is larger than 300, you should submit USGS form 9-4040-A. - Georg Patscheider Nov 30, 2018 at 14:03 However small scale antimatter weapons are much more affordable, as I mentioned earlier you can create a bullet with a 10 millionth of a gram of antimatter in it for only $600,000. Get all the latest science stories from across the ABC. The antimatter bomb would by far be the most powerful thing humans ever created. Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. We have a mole of atoms in a gram, or a total energy release of (2 GeV)(6 x 10^23)(1.6 x 10^-19 J/eV) = 2 x 10^14 J, or 200 terajoules. A boy can regenerate, so demons eat him for years. The gammas then scatter of air molecules, transferring the energy into heat. Joules. The pressure decays exponentially over time and has positive and negative (suction) phases. But because these collisions always produce matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts, the universe should, if the Big Bang model were correct, have exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Now you can destroy all life on earth using only about 6E4 kg of antimatter, only 60 metric tons of the good stuff. Estimated mass-energy of the observable universe. On the other hand, one milligram of 18F-FDG will contain on the order of 3x10^18 molecules. Ubuntu won't accept my choice of password. $<< 10^{32}J$ (gravitational binding energy of Earth), We must use an even bigger bomb. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003: 88. For safety purposes a range as wide as 26736702J has been stated for a gram of TNT upon explosion. The blast radius is merely an indicative number, and it is still UNSAFE to be anywhere close to the blast radius in a real-world scenario. The TNT equivalent appears in various nuclear weapon control treaties, and has been used to characterize the energy released in asteroid impacts. Let's estimate the safety distance for the detonation of bare exposed 0.5kg0.5~\mathrm{kg}0.5kg of TNT. Sorry, but I don't know where you can get the text of this book online. This page was last edited on 21 April 2023, at 04:10. If those are still fairly small numbers, how big would the Enterprise D exploding really be? Remove a chunk from a planet? But I don't know how to calculate that. During this interval, the pressure rises abruptly to a peak value and then decays exponentially over time. How does that last equation (rolled back for the time being; see revision history) work out? We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work. This one bullet would be equivalent to 378 grams of TNT, which is more powerful than a modern grenade. The only reason they dont exist yet is because they just so expensive to make. Antimatter is the opposite of matter. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. Given how difficult it is to make antimatter, this is probably the only way could do so using antimatter within the next 100 years. With about 100,000 ships out there, that's a lot of survivors. The team is called the ALPHA collaboration. From some rough calculations with 10g of anti hydrogen, I came out at roughly a gigatonne of TNT's worth of energy - 1.2x10^22J. This equivalency is most famously described in Einstein's equation: e (energy) = m (the mass of matter) xc (the speed of light) squared. The total global nuclear arsenal is about 15,000 nuclear warheads. "So this is by far the most energetic process that you can think of.". nuclear physics - Would a matter-antimatter explosion cause fallout And based on what we know about this terrifying-sounding substance, the Universe probably shouldn't exist at all. [5][6][7][8], Where for example the comparison is by energy yield, an explosive's energy is normally expressed for chemical purposes as the thermodynamic work produced by its detonation. However as science progresses it may be affordable to make an antimatter bomb with significantly more power than a nuclear bomb. Those made at CERN amount to about 1 nanogram. There's not really any point translating that to Australian dollars because it's absurd either way. 4. And that means no particles would remain to eventually become people, stars, and galaxies. Anti Matter Energy Calculator. When a bit of matter comes into contact with its evil antimatter twin, they cancel each other out, releasing all the energy stored inside them. In our case, we're taking the mass of earth plus the mass of the antimatter planet. I mean, in Star Trek, they use Matter/Antimatter reactions to power their starships, it's pretty powerful. What differentiates living as mere roommates from living in a marriage-like relationship? $3.6567*10^{18}kJ*K^{-1} * 200K=7.31310^{20} kJ$. It was created by an international team of scientists at CERN. An explosive, upon detonation, releases a large amount of energy. Con: You need a lotta bombs. For a 10 km dinosaur killer asteroid, 1 kg of antimatter should be sufficient retarget the asteroid -- actually quite a bit less would actually be needed because there are quite a few near earth objects that would need only a tiny orbital deflection to serve the purpose, the largest of these earth crossers, 1866 Sysyphusone of these objects happens to fit the bill as it is probably over 8 km diameter (close enough for our imagination) and currently scheduled to pass about 17 million km from the earth on Nov 24, 2071. ", "Beirut Explosion: What Happened in Lebanon and Everything Else You Need to Know", "Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media", "Seismic Experiments on the North German Explosions, 1946 to 1947", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long Term Health Effects", "Kinetic Energy of Tornadoes in the United States", "Frequently Asked Questions Electricity", "Country Comparison:: Electricity consumption", "NOAA FAQ: How much energy does a hurricane release? Unexpected uint64 behaviour 0xFFFF'FFFF'FFFF'FFFF - 1 = 0? A kiloton of TNT can be visualized as a cube of TNT 8.46 metres (27.8ft) on a side. By Snell's law, determine the incident angle by using our angle of incidence calculator. Antimatter weapons are currently too costly and unreliable to be viable in warfare, as producing antimatter is enormously expensive (estimated at $6 billion for every 100 nanograms), the quantities of antimatter generated are very small, and current technology has great difficulty containing antimatter, which annihilates upon touching ordinary matter. Often, the responses are droll ones such as love, cocaine, cash money, computer ink, or even sex. Such an asteroid would boil away the oceans and transform the atmosphere into one of steam and molten rock." Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. Antimatter are difficult to create and much less to contain. The best chemical rockets, like NASA's Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. c is the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second. The TNT explosion radius becomes: In case of ranges where the public access is denied, the blast radius becomes: Energy from different sources It's the only way to be sure. Expensive? So if correct the answer would answer question number 3, but questions number 1 and 2 are left unanswered. For instance, the antimatter equivalent to the electron is called the positron. The reality is that. (Note that this is not creation out of nothing, but rather the conversion of pre-existing energy into matter.) Scientists estimate creating and storing a gram of antimatter would cost in excess of a million billion dollars and require about 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy. The opposite to Worldbuilding: World Destruction, Improving the copy in the close modal and post notices - 2023 edition, New blog post from our CEO Prashanth: Community is the future of AI. Simple? A 10kg antimatter bomb would cause a gigantic 230 megaton explosion. What if I had a gram? The estimated energy at impact when the largest fragment of, Estimates in 2010 show that the kinetic energy of the. 1212 New York Ave., NW, Suite 650 Washington, DC 20005 | Phone: 202-429-9280 | Email: info@ime.org. A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:06PM ( #10432675 ) The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such that: You can calculate the blast radius or stand-off distance using the Hopkinson-Cranz scaling law. Antimatter: Most Expensive Substance on Earth - Science to go It's the most expensive substance on Earth, costing quadrillions of dollars for a single gram. So ever since I read a book (Angels and Demons by Dan Brown?) physics - Would one atom of antimatter be lethal if annihilated inside Gas-expansion and pressure-change effects tend to "freeze" the burn rapidly. Some humans would probably survive this, though. ', referring to the nuclear power plant in Ignalina, mean? Take a proton (a charged subatomic particle) 2. Therefore, just by doubling the distance, you'll be shielding yourself from significant exposure. But why do so many Christians still claim that God used the Big Bang to create the universe, especially when this scientifically bankrupt speculation contradicts the Genesis creation account in so many ways?5 The Big Bang is, and always has been, unsupported speculation. Bill Gates couldnt afford more than one millionth of a gram. Assuming perfect accuracy and a teleporter? For TNT this has been accurately measured as 4686J/g from a large sample of air blast experiments, and theoretically calculated to be 4853J/g. Now we need to know how this works in tons. Even on larger time scales, creating enough anti-matter to destroy the earth will still be very difficult without invoking the drop a rock strategy. The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8 10 17 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc 2), or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT - slightly less than the yield of the 27,000 kg Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. To some degree this is just like a normal nuclear explosion of the same yield. So to kill all humans you need 406,900 kg of antimatter. If antimatter makes contact with any ordinary matter it will explode, this includes air. The Big Bang is, and always has been, unsupported speculation. You can crash 10km sized asteroids into it, and there'll still be some survivors to whine about the injustice of it all. You get high-energy (~100 MeV) gammas, medium-energy (e.g., 511 keV) gammas, pions, muons, and neutrinos. The team can create thousands of antihydrogen atoms in only a second but the trap barely catches any. What could humans do to render the earth uninhabitable? $10^{32}J$ is simply the gravitational binding energy of the planet. There is such a thing as an antimatter trap. [1], The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 0.4-1%). While I can't provide any numbers to back this up, I have a feeling the answers to Part 2 and Part 3 are going to be the same. A large open explosion of TNT may maintain fireball temperatures high enough so that some of those products do burn up with atmospheric oxygen. Now, if we were sloppy, we would just pepper the land area of $148,300,000 km^2$, so about 1,236 MIEVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Entry Vehicles) with 100 2kg warheads each would do. The Truth about Angels, Demons and Antimatter | Live Science If you wanted to blow up the planet you could do so by exploding an antimatter bomb near the Earths core. You can think of it as matter's evil twin. Approximate yield of the last eruption of the. But in Star Trek Generations, the Enterprise D is destroyed (or at least the Star Drive Section) in a massive explosion when they lose antimatter containment, and it has 3,000 m of antimatter storage. The antihydrogen gets stuck in the area with the weakest magnetic field. Then her family intervened, Celebrities arrive at the Met Gala for fashion's biggest night, A year ago, this Australian couple fled Ukraine with their three cats. You can maybe kill everyone with less antimatter if you settled for giving everyone cancer instead. Most of the mass is antiprotons, which can annihilate with protons or neutrons, leading to $e^{\pm}$, $\gamma$, and mesons. Well, in theory if you mix one gram of matter with one gram of antimatter you should get 1.810 14 joules of energy or about 43 kilotons. [4], Alternative values for TNT equivalency can be calculated according to which property is being compared and when in the two detonation processes the values are measured. And yet, a piece of fruit makes antimatter too. The solar constant of the sun is 1370 watts per square meter and Earth has a, The solar constant of the sun is 1370 watts per square meter and Earth has a cross-sectional surface area of, 2022 Hunga TongaHunga Haapai volcanic eruption, total energy produced worldwide by all nuclear testing and combat, "Tons (Explosives) to Gigajoules Conversion Calculator", "Joules to Megatons Conversion Calculator", Blast effects of external explosions (Section 4.8. "In the case of a chemical reaction, you're transforming only about a millionth of the mass of the object of the molecule into energy,"Professor Doser says. Nope. With careful planning, I expect less well less than 1 gram of antimatter would be needed to make this a bad day for the earth. All I've ever read is science fiction, and they seem to be wildly wildly different in how dangerous Antimatter actually is. The asteroid belt just happens to contain a 400 km asteroid built to order, 10 Hygiea Plugging in the numbers (assuming a 17 km/sec impact) you get somewhat more than 1E28 joules, a rather significant savings compared the the gravitational potential of the earth, but still a lot of antimatter just to destroy it with a single bomb, roughly 6E10 kg of antimatter. This worksheet uses the property of energy called the heat of combustion or heat of explosion and is expressed in units of kilocalories per gram. Both humans and bananas only produce a tiny amount of antimatter, which is why we havent all been destroyed. What positional accuracy (ie, arc seconds) is necessary to view Saturn, Uranus, beyond? Surely you remember Einstein's famous E = Mc2. Matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another whenever they come into contact! This form is part of the U.S. implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and is submitted voluntarily by mines that conduct blasts with over 300 short tons "TNT equivalent" of explosives. in high school, I've been fascinated by the idea that Antimatter is pretty explosive. The sub-atomic particles of matter have the opposite properties of antimatter. [3], As of 2004[update], the cost of producing one millionth of a gram of antimatter was estimated at US $60 billion. You can also convert entire earth into energy but you have to look for antimatter earth to do it. which is equivalent to Sufficiently big detonations can presumably force a bit of fusion, but it is unlikely to be self-sustaining on its own without confinement.