Birth Of The Planet Earth - 1

                                                 

1) What happened during Earth’s “dark age” (thefirst 500 million years)?

It is now believed that during Earth’s formation,a Mars-sized planet collided with it, creating a huge cloud of debris that became Earth’s Moon and releasing so much heat that the entire planet melted. But little is known about how the resulting molten rock evolved during the planet’s infancy into the Earth we know today. The first 500 million years of Earth’s existence, known as the Hadean Eon, is a critical missing link in understanding how the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, and differentiated layers of core,mantle, and outer crust developed. Scientists have almost no idea how fast the surface environment evolved, how the transition took place, or when conditions became hospitable enough to support life.Some clues from Earth’s oldest minerals (zircons), as well as from Earth’s Moon and other planets are allowing a clearer picture of the Hadean Eon to gradually emerge. The future is certain to provide additional breakthroughs. The amount of information that can be extracted from even the tiniest samples of old rocks and minerals is increasing rapidly, and with concerted effort, it is expected that many more ancient rocks and mineral samples will be found.

2) What Is Anti-matter?

Antimatter particles are almost identical to their matter counterparts except that they carry the opposite charge and spin. When antimatter meets matter, they immediately annihilate into energy.
According to theory, the big bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, leaving nothing but energy behind. So in principle, none of us should exist.
And as far as physicists can tell, it’s only because, in the end, there was one extra matter particle for every billion matter-antimatter pairs. Physicists are hard at work trying to explain this asymmetry.
Antimatter is closer to you than you think. Small amounts of antimatter constantly rain down on the Earth in the form of cosmic rays, energetic particles from space. These antimatter particles reach our atmosphere at a rate ranging from less than one per square meter to more than 100 per square meter. Scientists have also seen evidence of antimatter production above thunderstorms.
But other antimatter sources are even closer to home. For example, bananas produce antimatter, releasing one positron—the antimatter equivalent of an electron—about every 75 minutes. This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. As potassium-40 decays, it occasionally spits out a positron in the process.
Our bodies also contain potassium-40, which means positrons are being emitted from you, too. Antimatter annihilates immediately on contact with matter, so these antimatter particles are very short-lived.

Humans have created only a tiny amount of antimatter. Antimatter-matter annihilations have the potential to release a huge amount of energy. A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. However, humans have produced only a minuscule amount of antimatter.
All of the antiprotons created at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms. Those made at CERN amount to about 1 nanogram. At DESY in Germany, approximately 2 nanograms of positrons have been produced to date.
If all the antimatter ever made by humans were annihilated at once, the energy produced wouldn’t even be enough to boil a cup of tea.
The problem lies in the efficiency and cost of antimatter production and storage. Making 1 gram of antimatter would require approximately 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy and cost over a million billion dollars.

To know more about Anti-matter - Click this!