Interstellar travel is only something humanity has achieved in science fiction — like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, which used antimatter engines to travel across star systems.

But antimatter isn’t just a sci-fi trope. Antimatter really exists.

Elon Musk has called antimatter power “the ticket for interstellar journeys,” and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to harness it.

Antimatter is made up of particles almost exactly like regular matter but with opposite electric charge.

That means when antimatter contacts regular matter, they both annihilate and can produce enormous amounts of energy.

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“Annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy,” Weed, co-founder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.

Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb.

It’s that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.

Source: Business Insider