May 3, 2025 04:31 PM
https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-do...ntimatter/
EXCERPT: It turns out that almost all interactions between fundamental particle produce antimatter. That’s because there is an important symmetry of nature known as charge conservation. You can’t add or subtract electric charge from a process, so whatever total charge you have going in must be the same coming out.
But because during interactions, particles can change identities and transform themselves, sometimes antimatter must be formed to keep everything balanced. For example, the positively charged proton can transform into a zero-charge neutron, but the reaction must then also make a (positively charged) positron to stay balanced.
Even light can create antimatter. A photon — a single bit of electromagnetic radiation — at sufficiently high energy can spontaneously convert itself into an electron-positron pair.
There is another much more prosaic source of antimatter in our everyday lives. You can even hold an antimatter generator in your hands. You just need a banana.
Bananas are rich in potassium, a vital nutrient. But there are many isotopes of potassium, containing the same number of protons in their nucleus, but a different number of neutrons. One in particular, potassium-40, is radioactive, with a half-life of about 30 days. And when potassium-40 decays, it naturally produces a positron as a part of the process.
Short lives, mostly
Despite their ease of creation, antimatter particles don’t stick around for long. That’s because when antimatter meets regular matter, both particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy equivalent to the masses of the particles involved.
This actually makes antimatter annihilation the most efficient source of energy generation, with no loss whatsoever. If you could somehow gather just one gram of antimatter and get it to react with regular matter, you would release the energy equivalent of a mid-sized atomic bomb.
There are countless such annihilation events happening throughout the cosmos every single second (including in your banana). Thankfully, they only involve one antimatter-matter particle pair at a time, and it’s almost always a positron and electron, which are incredibly light, meaning these events are not destructive.
Pretty much every high-energy reaction in the cosmos produces antimatter. This includes supernovae, active galactic nuclei (accreting supermassive black holes), stellar collisions, and more.
Because of the conservation of charge, for every electron and proton created, a positron and antiproton come into being. Most of these antiparticles are quickly swallowed up by the event that created them, smashing into their normal-matter counterparts and disappearing, but a few manage to stream away.
These antimatter particles become a small fraction of the larger population of cosmic rays... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: It turns out that almost all interactions between fundamental particle produce antimatter. That’s because there is an important symmetry of nature known as charge conservation. You can’t add or subtract electric charge from a process, so whatever total charge you have going in must be the same coming out.
But because during interactions, particles can change identities and transform themselves, sometimes antimatter must be formed to keep everything balanced. For example, the positively charged proton can transform into a zero-charge neutron, but the reaction must then also make a (positively charged) positron to stay balanced.
Even light can create antimatter. A photon — a single bit of electromagnetic radiation — at sufficiently high energy can spontaneously convert itself into an electron-positron pair.
There is another much more prosaic source of antimatter in our everyday lives. You can even hold an antimatter generator in your hands. You just need a banana.
Bananas are rich in potassium, a vital nutrient. But there are many isotopes of potassium, containing the same number of protons in their nucleus, but a different number of neutrons. One in particular, potassium-40, is radioactive, with a half-life of about 30 days. And when potassium-40 decays, it naturally produces a positron as a part of the process.
Short lives, mostly
Despite their ease of creation, antimatter particles don’t stick around for long. That’s because when antimatter meets regular matter, both particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy equivalent to the masses of the particles involved.
This actually makes antimatter annihilation the most efficient source of energy generation, with no loss whatsoever. If you could somehow gather just one gram of antimatter and get it to react with regular matter, you would release the energy equivalent of a mid-sized atomic bomb.
There are countless such annihilation events happening throughout the cosmos every single second (including in your banana). Thankfully, they only involve one antimatter-matter particle pair at a time, and it’s almost always a positron and electron, which are incredibly light, meaning these events are not destructive.
Pretty much every high-energy reaction in the cosmos produces antimatter. This includes supernovae, active galactic nuclei (accreting supermassive black holes), stellar collisions, and more.
Because of the conservation of charge, for every electron and proton created, a positron and antiproton come into being. Most of these antiparticles are quickly swallowed up by the event that created them, smashing into their normal-matter counterparts and disappearing, but a few manage to stream away.
These antimatter particles become a small fraction of the larger population of cosmic rays... (MORE - missing details)