First Step to an Antimatter Drive?
If your grew up with Star Trek you know that warp drives can’t exist without antimatter — well it seems now scientists have graduated from observing antimatter to actually creating it. Although there seem to be no solid plans to translate this advance to interstellar exploration:
Billions of particles of anti-matter created in laboratory
“Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma “jet.”
This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts. Anti-matter research also could reveal why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the start of the universe.”