nuclear or not

[claymore]

Is a matter - antimatter reaction nuclear fision and could it be controlled and used as a source of power? I suppose the question I should ask first is Where can you buy antimatter

[jake-the-peg]

No antimatter-matter is an anihilation neither fission or fusion.

Yes it would be a wonderful source of power were it available.

I think after a lot of effort Cern managed to create a few thousand atoms of anti-hydrogen but it takes far more energy to create than it liberates.

So unless you can find a large chunk of antimatter flying around in space it's not very likely to be a realistic source of fuel.

We don't think that it's very likely that you'll find any out there either because it would most likely to have come into contact with regular matter shortly after the big bang.

This leads to one of the big questions why there was more matter than anti-matter created leaving us with enough left over matter for everything around us.

It's an example of what is known as spontaneous symmetry breaking

[WeAreBongo]

What exactly is anti-matter? And why does it take so much energy to create? Isn't the universe meant to be literally fit-to-burst with anti-matter that we just cannot see or am I confusing it with dark-matter, whatever that might be?

[Loosehead]

There may be some antimatter in the Universe but it is anihilated as soon as it comesinto contact with matter. Yes the energy release would be enough to power a star ship at warp speed so scotty tells me but tricky to locate enough of it.

Wearebongo, I think you are taking about dark matter/energy only 5% of matter is as we understand it. The rest is present but not in the form of elements as we know them. The existance is deduced by the fact that there is not enough normal matter for Galactic cohesion. Simply put there is far too much gravity for the matter we can see. We know not what dark matter is but we know it is there by it's effect.

[Teddio]

Matter and antimatter undergo annihilation and energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation is produced. For example a proton and an antiproton will annihilate one another with the releaseof two high energy gamma photons. Mass turns to energy, the amount can be calculated using Einstein's equation: E = mc squared.