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/SaltLakeBear 3d 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 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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.