Featured Image Credit: Koto Feja/Getty Images
Topics: Science, Space, Technology
Ellie Kemp
If I quizzed you on the most expensive material in the universe, you might already have a few guesses in mind.
A rare type of diamond? Some sort of drug? A scarce, rare earth mineral? Well actually, no...
The answer is antimatter - a substance that, while incredibly difficult to manufacture, has the potential to send us soaring into space.
It's so rare, it's priced at a whopping $62.5 trillion for one gram - so it might be a good while yet until we can harvest antimatter's full potential.
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Antimatter is incredibly unusual because it takes about a billion years to form naturally, and even then, it's almost impossible to find.
So scientists have to create it themselves - and they can only do that in extremely advanced labs, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland.
If you’ve seen Tom Hank's Angels & Demons, you might remember it.
In the movie - and real life - if antimatter touches regular matter (which is basically everything around us), the two annihilate each other in a huge burst of energy.
Still not entirely sure what antimatter is? Let me explain...
Everything around us is made of matter: atoms, molecules, humans, the Earth.
Antimatter is like the mirror opposite of that. For every particle of matter, there's an antimatter version.
The two look almost the same, but have opposite electric charges. While a 'normal' electron has a negative charge, an antimatter version - called a positron - has a positive charge.
It’s super unstable and disappears instantly (like that one match on the dating apps!), if it hits regular matter. But it creates a huge burst of energy.
It’s very useful, especially in science and medicine, and we actually use a tiny bit of antimatter in medical tools like PET scans, which help doctors see how blood flows in the body.
Despite its crazy cost, scientists think antimatter could one day be used as a powerful energy source to help aid space travel. And that could take a while, because currently, the antiprotons produced at CERN in one year would only be enough to light a 100-watt electric light bulb for three seconds, as per How Stuff Works.
You can imagine how much more would be needed to explore the cosmos...
To delve deeper into space, we need more advanced spacecraft which travel faster than today's rockets can. This is where antimatter could be a real game-changer.
An antimatter engine would boost spacecraft, and could drastically cut travel time.
For example, right now a trip to Mars would take around a year. But with a special, antimatter engine, it would only take a month.
So, how exactly would this futuristic, incredibly expensive antimatter engine work?
Antimatter's volatility makes it dangerous to store, so magnetic fields would be used to suspend it mind-air inside circular storage rings.
Then, when the spacecraft needs power - to move, speed up or maneuver - the system releases a very small amount of the stuff, directing it toward a target made of regular matter.
But this must be done with the utmost precision, because releasing any more matter than needed could blow up your spacecraft.
When the antimatter and matter collide, they'll both disappear completely, turning 100 percent of their mass into pure energy.
All that energy from the explosion needs to be pushed in one direction so the spacecraft moves in the other, which is how propulsion works. So, the engine would use a special magnetic nozzle to direct the energy and particles out the back of the ship.
This thrust pushes the spacecraft forward - similar to how a balloon flies across the room when you let it go and air shoots out the back.
The boost from antimatter could also see us one day also visit Jupiter and Saturn in months instead of years and, perhaps most excitingly, explore beyond our solar system.
But while this technology is promising, it's still in its early stages.
And, costing trillions of dollars a gram, it could be add up to be most expensive feat in human history...