Those made at CERN amount to about 1 nanogram. There is such a thing as an antimatter trap. An antimatter weapon is a weapon which would use antimatter as a power source, a propellant or an explosive. in high school, I've been fascinated by the idea that Antimatter is pretty explosive. Sufficiently big detonations can presumably force a bit of fusion, but it is unlikely to be self-sustaining on its own without confinement. The word "antimatter" is not even mentioned anywhere in your question. Supposing we had many thousands of antimatter bombs (they can be detonated in many different locations), how much total antimatter would we need in order to wipe out all humans on Earth? Catch up with The Loop, Jock Zonfrillo remembered as an 'incredible chef' and influential member of Australia's culinary landscape, 'Until we meet in heaven': Maryborough community comes to grips with triple fatality as loved ones remembered, Perfect storm brewing for housing market and it could make buying your own home a pipedream, Reserve Bank tipped to leave interest rates on hold for a second month, ASX to open lower, Clare desperately wanted to stop drinking but she couldn't make it stick. This calculation helps us in finding the pressure loads on objects. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? $<< 10^{32}J$ (gravitational binding energy of Earth), We must use an even bigger bomb. This gives us an energy of around 3.6x10 23 J. Antimatter is one of the costliest materials in the world. Antimatter is one of the most unstable substances in the world. 1 gram of antimatter costs $62.5 trillion according to NASA. Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. The "kiloton (of TNT equivalent)" is a unit of energy equal to 4.184 terajoules (4.1841012J). Limitations of the TNT equivalent method), "Appendix B8 Factors for Units Listed Alphabetically", "Tons Of Tnt to Calories | Kyle's Converter", "Convert tons of TNT to joules | energy conversion", "Convert tons of TNT to BTU - British Thermal Unit | energy conversion", "Convert tons of TNT to foot pounds | energy conversion", "Tons Of Tnt to Kilowatt-hours | Kyle's Converter", "The Energy in Wildfires: The Western United States", "Local media: Blast at Cairo cathedral kills at least 25", "How do Thunderstorms and Lightning Work? [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%). Shortly after the supposed Big Bang, the universe would have been filled with extremely energetic photons. What differentiates living as mere roommates from living in a marriage-like relationship? For example, if a timber-cutting formula calls for a charge of 1kg of TNT, then based on octanitrocubane's RE factor of 2.38, it would take only 1.0/2.38 (or 0.42) kg of it to do the same job. So each 2 kg antimatter bomb (as it annihilates with 1kg ordinary matter) would have a blast similar to the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated in the puny humans' history. (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. Except the isochoric heat capacity of earth atmosphere is $C_v=.717kJ*kg^{-1}*K^{-1}$. And for my Trekkie friends out there, that also means fusion-poweredwarp driveslike those on Star Trek ships are unlikely to be a thing any time soon. 1 kg of antimatter = 53 megaton yield, 4000 kg antimatter = 212 billion ton TNT, $3.6567*10^{18}kJ*K^{-1} * 200K=7.31310^{20} kJ$. This one bullet would be equivalent to 378 grams of TNT, which is more powerful than a modern grenade. It was created by an international team of scientists at CERN. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. He also rips off an arm to use as a sword. Given how difficult it is to make antimatter, this is probably the only way could do so using antimatter within the next 100 years. What if I had 1 anti-hydrogen atom or enough antimatter that's equal in "weight" to a hydrogen atom? This bomb was only 50 megatons. Thanks for contributing an answer to Physics Stack Exchange! So far, all the antimatter created in all the particle accelerators on Earth wouldn't be enough to boil a cup of water. 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. Lowest tech level to blow up the solar system, Counting and finding real solutions of an equation, A boy can regenerate, so demons eat him for years. But whenever this happens when loads of energy gets concentrated and turned into the mass of matter antimatter isborn too. For a period of time after the Big Bang there was only energy. Let's estimate the safety distance for the detonation of bare exposed 0.5kg0.5~\mathrm{kg}0.5kg of TNT. "We make such minute quantities that even if you were to destroy all the antimatter that we're making in the course of a year, it wouldn't be even enough to boil a cup of tea.". Antimatter was successfully stored for the first time in 2010. The first is that the technology developed in CERN's Antimatter Factory has been appliedin medical imaging tools calledPET scanners. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003: 88. After a bit of number crunching that means agram of antiprotonantimatter would cost an absurd 5 quadrillion euros. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. So far, so good. And yet, there is very little antimatter in the universeso its been a known problem for many years. Crash it into an iridium block. Note It is convention to use ton compared to short ton, net ton American or tonne (1000 kilogrammes.) Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Can we add matter and antimatter to the universe? Joules. It only takes a minute to sign up. Extreme caution is advised. It's also likely the most explosive substance on the planet. One in every million collisions creates a proton-antiproton pair. This convention intends to compare the destructiveness of an event with that of conventional explosive materials, of which TNT is a typical example, although other conventional explosives such as dynamite contain more energy. A kiloton of TNT can be visualized as a cube of TNT 8.46 metres (27.8ft) on a side. We could make this happen if we work at it. This result eliminates one possible loophole that Big Bang cosmologists were hoping to exploit in an attempt to solve this longstanding problem with their model. He also rips off an arm to use as a sword. Now you can destroy all life on earth using only about 6E4 kg of antimatter, only 60 metric tons of the good stuff. WAY too much. Source: Ian Goddard and Cockell, Charles S. Impossible Extinction. Which ability is most related to insanity: Wisdom, Charisma, Constitution, or Intelligence? There are many hypothetical antimatter weapons, the most well known of which is the antimatter bomb. If you wanted to capture antihydrogen without it getting annihilated, then you would have to use something called a loffe trap. [3], The kiloton and megaton of TNT equivalent have traditionally been used to describe the energy output, and hence the destructive power, of a nuclear weapon. 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. Answer (1 of 3): What would happen if we detonated an antimatter bomb on Earth? 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. Interaction with the blast wave can cause severe injuries (see injury severity score calculator) depending on the stand-off distance. The antimatter we produce collides with matter and gets annihilated without us even noticing. The blast radius is the distance up to which the explosion will have an effect. Would it be imperceptible? 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. 2 kg of $E=mc^2 = 1.79 \times 10^{17} J$. Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987? Michael Doser who works in the only factory making it describes thisreaction as "probably the most violent process you can think of because the full mass of the object disappears and transforms into energy". Here they create and capture this bizarre anti-stuff. Would one atom of antimatter be lethal if annihilated inside the brain? Such an asteroid would boil away the oceans and transform the atmosphere into one of steam and molten rock." Instead of wasting 1E28 joules in an antimatter explosion on the surface of Earth, how about a nice 1E20 J bomb set off in a carefully drilled hole inside 10 Hygiea -- wait a few months and let gravity do most of the heavy lifting (or falling in this case) when 10 Hygiea impacts the Earth. This is becoming more and more obvious as time goes by. The recipethey use at CERN's Antimatter Factory to achieve this feat is: One in every million collisions creates a proton-antiproton pair. But so far, this mysterious anti-stuff remains elusive. At the moment of the Big Bang, all the energy of the Universe was concentrated and exploded. The total global nuclear arsenal is about 15,000 nuclear warheads. You have antimatter containment capsule that only has to hold out for seconds at most when fired. A much smaller amount embedded near the heart could of course kill you but the grenade-sized amount insures fairly well you won't survive--particularly if it is applied all at once directly to the body. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184 kilojoules (or 4184 joules) of energy are released. [11], So, one can state that a nuclear bomb has a yield of 15kt (6.31013J); but an actual explosion of a 15000ton pile of TNT may yield (for example) 81013J due to additional carbon/hydrocarbon oxidation not present with small open-air charges.[10]. "So we actually need infrastructure like at CERN, accelerators that will produce enough energy locally in a very small spot to produce pairs of an antiproton and a proton.". 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. Both humans and bananas only produce a tiny amount of antimatter, which is why we havent all been destroyed. 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. Similarly, you can estimate the blast radius for c4 explosives too. 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. 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. What if I had a gram? This equivalency is most famously described in Einstein's equation: e (energy) = m (the mass of matter) xc (the speed of light) squared. Would matter-antimatter annihilation create a fireball or not? Hence why I'm thinking they may have tried to say "Nope, 3,000m of Antimatter would really only be an explosion this big" as opposed to "Something as big as your hand would utterly level half of Rome" which is significantly smaller than 3,000m. Lesser known is its role in studying the anti-particles of the Universe. The same process happens in the human body too, so we're all creating anti-electrons. The blast radius for the 1 kg bare explosive detonation is 130 m. This answer is obtained by using the range safety equation, based on Hopkinson-Cranz Law: R = 130 W(1/3) = 130 1(1/3) = 130 m The intensity of the blast wave front is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. Ah yes, the multi-million dollar question. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? 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? 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 The reality is that. Antimatter are difficult to create and much less to contain. The ablative engine, which slowly vaporizes itself to produce thrust, could go as high as 5,000 seconds. TBX (thermobaric explosives) or EBX (enhanced blast explosives), in a small, confined space, may have over twice the power of destruction. 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. Unlike Big Bang speculation, these measurements, which are testable and repeatable, were real science. [10], Such differences can be substantial. Matter-antimatter annihilation from a hypothetical macroscopic explosion would produce the same particles as proton-antiproton annihilation in microscopic quantities in accelerator experiments. But that would miss all the boats, planes and submarines crowding their primitive buoyancy based transportation lanes. any large scale destruction of a city, with non antimatter device, on earth of a nuclear ready country would trigger mutually assured destruction, in what is estimated to be a thousand times over. The positron has the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge, rather than negative. "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 previous answer covered the bases fairly well for options 1 and 3. Professor Doser and his colleagues need anti-protons. 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. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184kilojoules (or 4,184 joules) of energy are released. The only reason they dont exist yet is because they just so expensive to make. In all honesty you can probably get away with less because the force of the explosion will likely kill many humans. During this interval, the pressure rises abruptly to a peak value and then decays exponentially over time. @Serban Tanasa: No, it's clearly not the same question. (Note that this is not creation out of nothing, but rather the conversion of pre-existing energy into matter.) 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. If those are still fairly small numbers, how big would the Enterprise D exploding really be? You have to give Big Bang scientists credit for their tenacity. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Back To Anycalculator.com Shock waves 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. rev2023.5.1.43405. Likewise, the antimatter counterpart to a proton is the anti-proton which has the same mass as a proton but with a negative charge. 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. Would it level the building? Therefore, just by doubling the distance, you'll be shielding yourself from significant exposure. Antihydrogen cannot be trapped using magnets as it doesnt have an electric charge. Why is this antimatter issue a big problem for the Big Bang? Under controlled conditions one kilogram of TNT can destroy (or even obliterate) a small vehicle. You can maybe kill everyone with less antimatter if you settled for giving everyone cancer instead. The blast radius becomes a critical parameter in such scenarios. Antimatter is just like normal matter, except that some of its properties are opposite that of normal matter. Or a kilogram? 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. 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. 4. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. Now we need to know how this works in tons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. A Tsar Bomb? For scenario 1, you'd probably be able to get by with even less just tens of grains per person, targeted at the brain would be enough to cause embolisms. There is no nuclear bomb that comes close to the power this bomb would have. Why do you say "pure gamma"? But I mean, I'm leaning towards Star Trek being somewhat more accurate, they gloss over how Warp Drive works in the Original Series, but by the time The Next Generation came about in 1987 they explained how Warp Drive works, and then we had a working theory on the Alcubierre Drive by 1994. A blast wave unleashes a large amount of energy that causes changes in pressure and temperature along its path. "Kiloton" redirects here. However for only $600,000 you could fit a 10 millionth of a gram of antimatter into a snipers bullet. The solar irradiance of the Sun every 12 hours. Converts antimatter to energy in joules. So yeah, how much antimatter would it take to level a house? 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. 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. Antimatter would do the same. 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. Bananas are made out of potassium-40 which produces positrons as it decays. The problem lies in the efficiency and cost of antimatter production and storage. Check out 477 similar physics calculators, Social Media Time Alternatives Calculator. The main hurdles are the production and storage of large amounts of antimatter. But antimatter is incredibly scarce, and scientists still dont know why. Why is matter-antimatter asymmetry surprising, if asymmetry can be generated by a random walk in which particles go into black holes? Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Thankfully, outside the realms of science fiction, we won't see antimatter destroying cities anytime soon. We know from the show that they use Deuterium and Anti-Deuterium, so not a "complex" element compared to say, using Uranium and Anti-Uranium. If the Big Bang led to equal parts matter and antimatter forming, these probably would have then bumped into each other, obliterated one another, and then presumably exploded again. A large open explosion of TNT may maintain fireball temperatures high enough so that some of those products do burn up with atmospheric oxygen. Which means we shouldnt exist, physicists are still unsure as to why were around. Currently we use fusion not antimatter, however whereas fusion only converts 1% of the fuels mass energy into thrust, antimatter can convert 40%. One of the scariest things about the antimatter bomb is that the effects of it arent as long lasting as a nuclear bomb. 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). If you have an absurdly large fireball it will tend to spread more upwards (less pressure, longer mean-free path) and send a big plasma cloud up - bad from an electromagnetic pulse, ozone layer and IR energy igniting stuff perspective. Theviolence of an antimatterreactionwas clearly demonstrated when a tiny pinch of the stuff exploded over Vatican City in the fictional Dan Brown epic, Angels and Demons. "Antimatter appears every single time matter appears," Professor Doser says. Nope. Given a pair of explosives, one can produce 2 the shockwave output (this depends on the distance of measuring instruments) but the difference in direct metal cutting ability may be 4 higher for one type of metal and 7 higher for another type of metal. A typical blast wave has a high-pressure jump, which denotes the wavefront. Approximately 10 grams of antiprotons would be enough fuel to send a manned spacecraft to Mars in one month. This sounds like a good thing at first, but it just means that antimatter weapons could be seen as more politically acceptable, and therefore more likely to be used in warfare. The explosive energy of a quantity of TNT of the. The team can create thousands of antihydrogen atoms in only a second but the trap barely catches any. In other words, antimatter planets, antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies could be a thing. To some degree this is just like a normal nuclear explosion of the same yield. You bet. An explosive, upon detonation, releases a large amount of energy. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. Estimated mass-energy of the observable universe. When the antimatter starts reacting antiprotons and positrons will be kicked away, mixing with the air. How much energy would be released in a collision of planets of matter & antimatter? These complications have been sidestepped by convention. Approximate yield of the last eruption of the. Some of the radiation will doubtless cause fission or transmutation - a nucleus hit by an anti-proton is likely to at least lose a nucleon, and the mesons also happily react with nuclei. I rolled back the edit that added a formula at the end, which was the reason for my comment. Comparing with nuclear weapons, this is about 50 kton TNT. 1 megaton is about 4.2x10 15 J. Electron + positron = 2 * gamma going opposite directions and having nearly the same energy of electron + positron mass-energies. In John Barnes' excellent Thousand Cultures series, the ultimate nasty weapon is the teleportation of antimatter into the atmosphere as a very fine dust spread over a large volume. Now that you know how to calculate blast radius, you can use the calculator to estimate safety distances. However that would require a lot more than 10kg.