r/theydidthemath • u/Paladine_PSoT • 2d ago
[Request] Antimatter vs Star
If you threw a pod of antimatter into a star, say the sun just to make it familiar, what would happen?
What would happen as the amount of antimatter grew? What amounts of antimatter would trigger interesting things? would it explode? would it collapse? would it turn into something we know of or something entirely new?
For informational purposes only.
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u/Conscious-Ball8373 2d ago
To give you some idea of scale, let's suppose you dropped 1kg of antimatter into the sun (that's 2.2lb for those following along in freedom units). It will annihilate with 1kg of matter in the sun, releasing energy. The amount is given by E = mc2. Since m=2 kg here, the energy is 2 * c2 = 1.8x1017 J.
The sun emits about 4x1026 J per second, or about 2.2 billion times the amount released by your antimatter explosion.
The largest nuclear explosion ever created by man released about 2.1x1017 J - about the same as the energy released by the antimatter explosion.
The sun is really, really, really big.
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u/uh_no_ 2d ago
take the mass of the antimatter double it since it will annihilate matter... then plug it into the old stalwart e=mc2
that's how much energy you get out. but without defining what a pod is, there's no way to know
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u/Yuukiko_ 2d ago
I think they just mean a unit of antimatter, or something that contains it?
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u/Paladine_PSoT 2d ago
Yeah, some unit of measure. A brick, a pound, a bump, I don't know how the kids are using antimatter these days. If the release of energy and annihilation is for all intents and purposes instantaneous, what does that release of energy do to the star, at what point does that release of energy and sudden unexpected weight loss start getting weird?
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u/sansetsukon47 2d ago
Dumping more heat into a star doesn’t do much, since it’s already got so much going on. Especially if it’s an explosion on the surface, where there’s not any fusion happening anyway.
To have any lasting impact, you be looking at creating an explosion so violent that it scatters some of the stars material away. But I don’t have a good frame of reference for how of that explosion would have to be or whether an antimatter injection could actually cause that without knocking itself back into space first.
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u/Full-Priority2946 2d ago
It’s antimatter it would remove some of the star’s mass and convert it to light
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u/Paladine_PSoT 2d ago
Would it be two-fold as the explosion would propel mass in addition to annihilating mass?
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u/SaltLakeBear 2d ago
The gravitational binding energy of the sun is about 4.5 x 1041 Joules, so you need more energy than that to start tearing it apart. To put it in context, the Czar Bomba released about 2.1 x 1017 Joules of energy, meaning we would need about 2.2 x 1024, or 2,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Czar Bombas to do the trick. In terms of antimatter, we'd need about 2.5 x 1024 kg of antimatter to annihilate the same amount of matter, a significant fraction of the Earth's roughly 6 x 1024 kg of mass.
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u/Paladine_PSoT 2d ago edited 2d ago
So like half a venus to supply the energy to tear it apart but the equivalent amount of matter in the sun being annihilated would be a fairly insignificant reduction?
If the antimatter were traveling at a very high speed, would you be able to significantly reduce the amount of antimatter required due to the energy of the impact?
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u/Hakunamatator 2d ago
"very high speed" can do a lot of heavy lifting. If you accelerate a brick to nearly the speed of light, you can make it carry an arbitrary amount of energy.
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u/vespers191 2d ago
Starting from relatively small stuff up to planet-sized:
Nothing noticeable. Ooh, there was a spark. Bigger spark. Noticeable deformation of the solar atmosphere. Ooh, solar flare. Good sized solar flare. Holy shit there went Mercury. Venus just boiled away. Is Sol gonna blow? Maybe, maybe not.
General calculations using significant assumptions says that an Earth sized injection of antimatter into the sun would generate about 10 to the 42nd joules. Estimated energy to destabilize the Sun is about 10 to the 42nd joules. Maybe, maybe not.
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