3 ms·

One antiproton annihilation will give you about 1 GeV. Annihilate a billion of them, and you've got 10^18 eV. One eV is about 10^(-19) Joules. So, yeah. A t

• spullara 15y ago
  And the larger planets might have 27 kilowatt hours worth! Hopefully something was lost in translation of this article from scientists to journalists.
• kragen 15y ago
  Here are a couple of things: • If it only persists for minutes, that's a tenth of a joule per few minutes, if you have some way to capture and confine it away from the corrupting influence of matter. That sounds a little bit more practical than a tenth of a joule, total. • The big deal with antimatter is that it has a high energy density. Even if you have a very small amount of it, it still has a high energy density. A hundred joules can accelerate a one-milligram spacecraft to 5000 meters per second, which is almost enough to stay in low earth orbit. 10 kJ can accelerate a one-microgram spacecraft to 1.6 million m/s, or 0.5% of the speed of light. And 10kJ of matter/antimatter reaction works out to 5.6 × 10⁻¹⁴ g, so it's easy to imagine containing that much in a one-microgram spacecraft. If you can gather a tenth of a joule of antimatter per hour, you only need 11 years to gather enough antimatter to launch your one-microgram probe toward Alpha Centauri.