Chapter 1: What happens when a meteor hits Earth?
Meteors have the power to transform our planet, to wipe out huge swaths of life on Earth in one impact. But not all are that dramatic. We are hit by more than 100 tons of small, sand-sized particles every day, and they are essentially unnoticeable.
About once a year, a car-sized meteor comes crashing through our atmosphere, but the resultant, impressive, fiery streak burns up long before hitting the ground. It's only on the scale of millions of years that we are in danger of being hit by meteors a kilometre or two wide, big enough to do some serious damage. But we've not seen one of those since the dinosaurs, lucky for us.
But size isn't everything. In fact, the biggest impacts may not even be from the largest objects. If one particularly interesting theory is true, some very rare meteors may be made of something a little more exotic than rock. Externally, there would be not much to differentiate these rarer meteors. In the vacuum of space, they would appear exactly the same as any other space rock.
But while regular meteors might create a fiery streak in the sky, These outliers would have impacts that exceed the largest of nuclear bombs. And those are just the small ones. If a kilometre sized meteor of this variety hit the earth, similar in size to the normal meteor that killed the dinosaurs, we might not have a planet anymore. That is the power of a meteor made of antimatter.
Could antimatter meteors really exist? What clues would help us identify them from regular matter meteors? And how big would they have to be to become a major problem? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we test the scientific theory behind antimatter meteors and explore the odds of such objects lurking in our solar system. Antimatter is a funny substance.
The fact that it exists means that we shouldn't be here. It is almost identical to regular matter, with a few key differences. One is that it has an inverted charge. Another is that when antimatter meets regular matter, the two annihilate each other completely, converting almost entirely into energy. Now, in the early universe, it wasn't just matter that was created.
In theory, an equal amount of athymata came into being too. all the matter should have bumped into the antimatter, and everything would have cancelled each other out. This would have left no universe for us, as there would be nothing to make the universe out of.
It is one of the mysteries of science that this did not happen, and for some reason a slightly larger amount of matter coalesced into existence than antimatter, perhaps as small a discrepancy as a billion and one matter particles to every billion antimatter ones. Scientists are still trying to figure out why this might have occurred, but the mystery remains unsolved for now.
Perhaps there is some role at play that we've not yet identified. Whatever caused it, this imbalance is the reason the universe we see around us is almost entirely made of regular matter. And the only place we reliably see antimatter is when they make tiny amounts of it in experiments at CERN and in other particle accelerators.
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Chapter 2: Could antimatter meteors actually exist?
50 megatons, we're still only looking at 2.09 times 10 to the power 17 joules, a full 5,000 times weaker than our antimatter ground piano. And the Tsar's bomber blast was so great, towns within 55 kilometres like 70, were leveled. Wooden buildings 160 km away were reportedly damaged. The light from the blast was seen 1000 km away. Windows in Norway and Finland were shattered by the explosion.
If just 600kg of our antimatter meteor impacted in the middle of a state like Texas, the whole state would be destroyed. The centre vaporised, the rest devastated. This is just the energy release from our antimatter meteor annihilating on the ground, not even going into things like kinetic energy. But even then, it's actually not just the 600kg that hits the ground we need to worry about.
When you consider the rest of that 91,200 kilograms of mass that was annihilated in the atmosphere, the blast radius becomes a lot bigger. While some of that energy would travel upwards into space, minimizing the damage below, suddenly you're not just worrying about Texas, you're worrying about the entirety of the USA. All that's just from an antimatter meteor that's comparable in size to a car.
We really do not want to get hit by an antimatter meteor. So what actually are the risks here? Let's say that an antimatter meteor had got swept up in the Sun's gravity well millions to billions of years ago. Could it now be one of the 40,155 near-Earth asteroids that NASA tracks? The good news is, no. For one simple reason. Space isn't actually empty.
While we talk of space being a vacuum, even in space there are trace amounts of dust floating in the void. As such, an antimatter asteroid travelling even through the interstellar medium would not likely have a survival rate of longer than around 300 years.
As we last clipped another star 70,000 years ago, Schultz's star, in case you're interested, it would have to have been an exceptionally lucky antimatter meteor to not only dodge all the other asteroids in that time, but also to have not encountered enough dust since then that it would have disintegrated into gamma radiation.
For this same reason, an interstellar antimatter comet coming through our solar system would be unlikely. Small ones would burn up before reaching us, and larger masses would be noticeable. They would emit a steady stream of gamma rays as they travelled, making them detectable to our telescopes.
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Chapter 3: What are the unique properties of antimatter?
No such sparkling asteroids have ever been detected. So, all in all, while it would be devastating to be hit by an antimatter meteor, it is unlikely that one would survive long enough to reach our planet, assuming they and antimatter stars exist in the first place. we are probably quite safe. Besides, if antimatter meteors existed, we might have seen some evidence of them before.
Meteor impacts with unusual destructive capacity, but leaving no traces of the meteor that caused it, we've not seen anything like that. Have we? In June 1908, a fireball lit up the sky in a remote part of Siberia.
The meteor exploded before hitting the ground, its detonation causing massive forest fires and sending trees crashing to the ground like bowling pins in an area of destruction kilometers wide. Witnesses more than 30km away reported seeing a flash brighter than the sun, followed by a roar of thunder.
Due to its remoteness, scientific teams did not arrive at the site until 1927, but even then, the destruction caused by the blast was easy to see. Strangely, for an object that caused such destruction, almost no trace of the meteor was ever found, beyond a few microparticles. But the Tunguska event couldn't have been caused by an antimatter meteor, could it?
Don't worry, we know that it probably wasn't an antimatter meteor, but there was a lot of debate about the topic in the past, and we couldn't resist being a little spooky. I'm happy to announce we have a weekly newsletter to keep up with all the discoveries in our cosmos and our designer Peter has made the most beautiful email you'll ever receive. Sign up with the link down below.
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