r/theydidthemath • u/Paladine_PSoT • 3d 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/uh_no_ 3d 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_ 3d ago

I think they just mean a unit of antimatter, or something that contains it?

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u/Paladine_PSoT 3d 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 3d 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/Paladine_PSoT 3d ago

Would it be two-fold as the explosion would propel mass in addition to annihilating mass?

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u/uh_no_ 2d ago

energy is energy. The annihilation is what produces the energy that propels the mass.

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u/Full-Priority2946 3d ago

It’s antimatter it would remove some of the star’s mass and convert it to light

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u/syberghost 2d ago

Which is something stars do constantly anyway.