There are many ways to calculate "TNT equivalence" and the term is often misused because the property in question and basis for the equivalence are not defined. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. [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. But even this is insanely expensive for only one bullet. Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.18410 12 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one half gram of antimatter reacting with one half gram of ordinary matter (one gram total) results in 21.5 kilotons-equivalent of energy (the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945). The TNT equivalent appears in various nuclear weapon control treaties, and has been used to characterize the energy released in asteroid impacts. Gas-expansion and pressure-change effects tend to "freeze" the burn rapidly. Even on larger time scales, creating enough anti-matter to destroy the earth will still be very difficult without invoking the drop a rock strategy. And so do we! [2] Annihilation requires and converts exactly equal masses of antimatter and matter by the collision which releases the entire mass-energy of both, which for 1 gram is ~91013 joules. The explosive energy of a quantity of TNT of the. Would one atom of antimatter be lethal if annihilated inside the brain? achieving the specified result. One in every million collisions creates a proton-antiproton pair. The antimatter we produce collides with matter and gets annihilated without us even noticing. I have no idea how to get that in an antimatter bomb, because of the fizzle problem noted above. With ANFO or ammonium nitrate, they would require 1.0/0.74 (or 1.35) kg or 1.0/0.32 (or 3.125) kg, respectively. Antimatter is just like normal matter, except that some of its properties are opposite that of normal matter. [3], As of 2004[update], the cost of producing one millionth of a gram of antimatter was estimated at US $60 billion. Supposing we had one antimatter bomb (it has to be detonated in one particular location, but it can be as big as necessary, even as big as an entire city), how much antimatter would we need in order to eradicate all animals on Earth? barrels of oil. At least when you think in other literature, something that could fit in your hand could destroy literally an entire country. "The best explanation that we have found up to now is to say that there's a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles,"Professor Doser says. There's no way $10^{32} / 10^{17} = 10^{27}$, much less $10^{32} \times 10^{17} = 10^{27}$, no matter where you place any 1.72 multiplicative factor. "One particle is left over out of a billion, and this one particle out of a billion is everything we see in the Universe. This calculation helps us in finding the pressure loads on objects. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. 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 is one of the more common types of "TNT equivalence" and is the one used on USGS form 9-4040A. This amazing device creates a region of space where the magnetic field gets larger in all directions. In other words, antimatter planets, antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies could be a thing. No country has considered it worth it to make one, and even the richest businessmen in the world dont have the funds to build one. 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. Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. I was planning on adding more to this response, but I think Serban covered it as well as I can for numbers #1 and #2. If you absolutely, positively need to sterilize the surface, you must blast it from orbit. Actually, its even worse than that, because matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another whenever they come into contact! Why refined oil is cheaper than cold press oil? A merger of two black holes, resulting in the. Has the cause of a rocket failure ever been mis-identified, such that another launch failed due to the same problem? This stops it from making contact with matter. Strange Frontiers, episode 2:The factory where one of the most expensive and elusive materials is made. Bananas are made out of potassium-40 which produces positrons as it decays. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. 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. Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford, points out the time problem, too. This wave leads to an abrupt increase in pressure. Also, once in atmosphere, any attempt to shoot down will only damage the containment system and detonate the antimatter. Why is matter-antimatter asymmetry surprising, if asymmetry can be generated by a random walk in which particles go into black holes? MathJax reference. $10^{32}J$ is simply the gravitational binding energy of the planet. Ubuntu won't accept my choice of password. Extreme caution is advised. The team can create thousands of antihydrogen atoms in only a second but the trap barely catches any. Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. Both antimatter and matter were created after the big bang, and the universe should be made up of 50% matter, and 50% antimatter. It's also likely the most explosive substance on the planet. And if you're concerned that this work doesn't warrant fooling around with such a violently explosive anti-substance, Professor Doser says there's no need to worry. Where can I find a clear diagram of the SPECK algorithm? So to kill all humans you need 406,900 kg of antimatter. 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. This is generally ignoring the radiation effect of all the gamma rays, that might change the maths. You have to give Big Bang scientists credit for their tenacity. This law states that two identical explosives produce similar blast waves but have different sizes, given the conditions, geometry, and scaled distances are identical. Generating points along line with specifying the origin of point generation in QGIS. Antimatter annihilation from anti-hydrogen is surprisingly messy: it will not be pure gamma rays. This enables engineers to determine the proper masses of different explosives when applying blasting formulas developed specifically for TNT. 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. 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. So far, so good. The damage done to the biosphere here is more due to pressure and heat than radioactivity. CAUTION 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. Supposing we had one antimatter bomb, how much antimatter would we need in order to completely blow up the Earth into millions of pieces. But say I had 1 Antimatter Electron, and I just opened a container in a room, what would happen? Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. Number 3 just a really big bang deep down. [7][8], An antimatter weapon is a part of the plot of the Dan Brown book Angels & Demons and its film adaptation, where it is used in a plot to blow up the Vatican City.[9][5]. Check the revision history; if it's appropriate, feel free to roll back my roll back! 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: The intensity of the blast wave front is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance. And the final is that it might help us solve a fairly enormous cosmic conundrum: why the material universe exists. Which means we shouldnt exist, physicists are still unsure as to why were around. When antimatter collides with matter it can end up creating the largest explosion in human history. The Big Bang is, and always has been, unsupported speculation. You get high-energy (~100 MeV) gammas, medium-energy (e.g., 511 keV) gammas, pions, muons, and neutrinos. I mean, in the book I read, they had an antimatter device that you could hold in your hand and it would have destroyed I believe the entire Vatican City. 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. Here they create and capture this bizarre anti-stuff. Professor Doser once estimated how muchit would cost to make antimatter in large amounts. When groups of people are asked to name the most expensive substance, the variety of answers is hilarious. So not only would they be more powerful than nukes, but also more likely to be used on people. Would it be imperceptible? Therefore, just by doubling the distance, you'll be shielding yourself from significant exposure. So yeah, how much antimatter would it take to level a house? Nope. >$10^{15}kg$, it's not exactly rocket science. Antimatter would do the same. Converts antimatter to energy in joules. Most of the mass is antiprotons, which can annihilate with protons or neutrons, leading to $e^{\pm}$, $\gamma$, and mesons. Matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another whenever they come into contact! The OP wanted it all in one bomb, so I told him his bomb must release at least that much energy. 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. So if correct the answer would answer question number 3, but questions number 1 and 2 are left unanswered. You'll need a fair bit of antimatter, um, let's see 1 Mt is $4.1\times10^{15} J$ so the Tsar Bomba (in the tested config) at $42MT = 1.72 \times10^{17} J$ If those are still fairly small numbers, how big would the Enterprise D exploding really be? TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. "We actually expect that the whole Universe since there was lots of energy around at the moment of the Big Bang should consist of equal amounts of matter and antimatter," Professor Doser says. The gammas then scatter of air molecules, transferring the energy into heat. This would cause the entire Earth to explode and break into thousands of pieces. The shock wave is usually spherical or hemispherical in shape. At least a trillion tons, probably an order of magnitude or so more when you account for noncentral location and dissipation loss. A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. And based on what we know about this terrifying-sounding substance, the Universe probably shouldn't exist at all. Professor Doser and his colleagues need anti-protons. 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. But it's really not that big of an explosion. Let's shoot to heat up the atmosphere by 200K; there's no way anyone's surviving that. There is no antimatter left in the Universe from the Big Bangthat we're aware of, he says. What if I had 1 anti-hydrogen atom or enough antimatter that's equal in "weight" to a hydrogen atom? Antihydrogen cannot be trapped using magnets as it doesnt have an electric charge. Ah yes, the multi-million dollar question. Q3 is very hard to answer you need to completely overwhelm the gravitational pull of earth so only terraforming don't qualify for millions of pieces. You can crash 10km sized asteroids into it, and there'll still be some survivors to whine about the injustice of it all.