• Question: what is antimmatter?

    Asked by se4n to Aaron, Abbey, Keith, Natalie, Pete on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      In Physics, there are some ideas that can seem a bit crazy and one of these is antimatter. Antimatter is made of antiparticles, which are like the opposite of the particles that you and I are made of. Antiparticles weigh the same as particles do but they have opposite charges (for instance, an anti-electron, which is known as a positron, and an electron will have the same mass as each other but a positron will be positively charged whereas a normal electron is negatively charged).

      Antiparticles can bind to each other like normal particles bind to each other, to make up antimatter. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other! This process can release lots of energy. Antiparticles have been created in laboratories and studied, you can read more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

    • Photo: Aaron Boardley

      Aaron Boardley answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      It’s hard to imagine the opposite of matter (matter is just a general term for all the ‘stuff’ in the universe that we see, touch, interact with every day – made up of atoms which have protons, neutrons and electrons).

      We can think of black as the opposite of white, or hot as the opposite of cold, or light as the opposite of heavy. Well, antimatter is sort of like the opposite of matter.

      It’s hard to picture, because antimatter is different to ‘nothing’. An empty box and a box full of antimatter are different things! Antimatter behaves in an ‘opposite’ way to normal matter, but it is still there. By opposite, I mean things like the electric charges of particles – instead of negative electrons in an atom, you get positive positrons, for example.

      There is still so much left to understand about antimatter. One of the biggest mysteries is: why isn’t there more of it? If everything was symmetrical you’d expect there to be as much antimatter as there is normal matter, but that doesn’t seem to be case. Scientists are studying this – perhaps it’s something you’d be interested in studying and helping to find out yourself!

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