• Question: What is anti-matter?

    Asked by Hannah to Greg, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 16 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 16 Mar 2016:


      They are sort of like the opposites of normal types of matter, and have the same mass but other opposing properties. I am really not an expert on this, but one thing I do know is that if matter and anti-matter collide they cancel each other out and both are destroyed!

    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 16 Mar 2016:


      Don’t really know much about this either. Antimatter is material made of of antiparticles, which have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but opposite charges, as well as other particle properties. Collisions between particles and antiparticles lead to the destruction of both, giving rise to variable proportions of intense photons. Antiparticles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter.

    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 16 Mar 2016:


      Like the others have said, antiparticles can have the opposite charge from their corresponding matter particles, e.g. an electron is negatively charged, whereas its antiparticle, the positron, is positively charged. This isn’t always the case though: the neutrino also has an antineutrino, but neither neutrinos nor antineutrinos have any charge! In that case it’s different properties that are opposite – and like the others, I’ve forgotten which ones those are.

      Antimatter isn’t anything particularly weird, it’s a fundamental way of how the universe works. The sun produces energy by nuclear fusion where hydrogen turns into helium. As part of that reaction, antimatter positrons are produced, so you can see that it happens all the time. What is weird is that when the universe was created in the big bang, we think that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made, but we can see much more matter than antimatter in the universe. We have no explanation for this! Perhaps you could be the one to solve that puzzle?

Comments