Written in SCIENCE he
Interstellar travel is something that has only been possible in Star Trek movies, using antimatter engines to travel through star systems. And, although these types of trips are fiction, the antimatter it is not.
Antimatter is made up of particles almost exactly the same as normal matter but with the opposite electrical charge. That means that when antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, they both annihilate and can produce enormous amounts of energy.
In fact, billionaire Elon Musk has called its power “the ticket to interstellar travel” and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to harness it, Insider detailed.
“The annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy,” Weed, co-founder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop a propulsion system of antimatter.
Just a gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It’s that kind of energy that could take us where no one has gone before at record speed.
In theory, an engine antimatter could accelerate a spacecraft to 9.8 meters per second squared and take us to Proxima in just five years, Weed said in 2016. That’s 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1, one of the fastest spacecraft in history, to travel half the distance. according to NASA.
Would it be possible to create an antimatter engine?
The reason we don’t have engines antimatter, Despite its tremendous capabilities, it comes down to cost, not technology, they detail in Insider.
Gerald Jackson, an accelerator physicist who worked on antimatter at Fermilab, he told Forbes in 2016 that, with enough funding, we could have a prototype spacecraft of antimatter in a decade.
He added that he has designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter by year.
“For a 10-kilogram scientific package traveling at 2% of the speed of light, 35 grams of antimatter are needed to decelerate the spacecraft and inject it into orbit around Proxima Centauri,” Jackson told the outlet.
He detailed that $8 billion would be needed to build a solar power plant for the enormous energy needs of antimatter production and it would cost $670 million a year to operate.
This means that in theory it is possible, but someone is required to finance the project.