Discussion
Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck
voidUpdate: If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous
comrade1234: What is that in firecrackers?Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
brumbelow: “Antimatter in a truck” is great headline material, but the actual advance is portable precision instrumentation.CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now
imhoguy: Next milestone: put it in Warptruck™ as fuel
alansaber: Only 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat
observationist: You (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!
AnimalMuppet: For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton?For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
voidUpdate: Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
schindlabua: Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
brendanfinan: https://home.web.cern.ch/order
eternauta3k: What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?
ozim: Stop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.
post-it: I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.
dandellion: Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
rbanffy: Very, very bright.
drob518: Annihilated.
swiftcoder: I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
rbanffy: Much safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.
drob518: Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.
GolfPopper: Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
Sardtok: Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
elil17: Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
kakacik: There is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough dovnvotes for today
csense: From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
d_silin: Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
wiredfool: When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
api: E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
sincerely: AI slop account
yibg: Not familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
jjmarr: > Various antiproton-powered rocket systems have been proposed. All of which rely on the particles released to supply direct thrust or to heat a working fluid by interparticle collisions or by heating a solid core first [14]. There is also the possibility to use the heated working fluid to generate electricity for electric propulsion systems [14].> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.Not the same paper, but goes into more detail.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266620272...
adrianN: Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
throwaway894345: Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?
PowerElectronix: It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
isolli: How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?
dodobirdlord: Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.
goda90: Use the antimatter as an electricity source to power ion thrusters, maybe?
