Antimatter
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Antimatter is stuff within the universe that is the equal and opposite of matter. It looks just like matter and acts just like matter, but cannot touch matter.
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[change] What it is made of
In physics, all the elementary particles, or the basic building blocks of the things we can touch, come in pairs. Each particle has what is called an antiparticle, much like an evil twin, which may look and act just like the regular particle, except for one major difference. An example is the electron and the positron. They both weigh the same, and act the same, but the electron has a negative electrical charge, while the positron has a positive electrical charge, which is where the positron gets its name.
Other antimatter particles are the same way, where they have the same weight, and look and act the same as regular particles, but their electrical charge is the opposite of regular particles. Antihydrogen, for example, has the positron, which is positively charged, orbiting around an antiproton, which is negatively charged, which is the opposite way regular hydrogen looks, which has the electron (negative charge), orbiting around a proton (positive charge).
[change] Annihilation
Albert Einstein, a very famous scientist, found a formula that can tell how much energy a certain amount of something has, whether it is matter or antimatter. This formula is E = mc2, and is one of the most well known equations. In simple terms, if you take the mass of something and the multiply it by the speed of light, and then multiply it by the speed of light again, you'll get how much pure energy a given piece of something has. Since the speed of light is such a big number, this means that even a small amount of matter can have a lot of energy.
The reason this is salient for antimatter is because scientists found that when matter and antimatter touch each other, the amount of energy that is emancipated comes very close to the amount of energy E = mc2 says should be all together in those two pieces. The reason is that each particle of matter, when it touches its antiparticle in the antimatter world, both change over into pure energy, or annihilate each other. This release of such a high amount of energy is why a lot of science fiction writers use antimatter for fuel in their stories. For example, author Dan Brown uses antimatter in "Angels and Demons" to make his story interesting. It is also being looked at as a fuel source for real-life missions to outer space in the future.
[change] Big Bang
A lot of scientists think that in the first few moments after the Big Bang, which (in theory) created the universe a very long time ago, there was both matter and antimatter mixing together. Since there was just a little bit more matter than antimatter created (scientists still haven't figured out why this happened yet), whatever was left over after most of the matter and antimatter annihilated into energy became the Universe we see today. Physicists have not yet discerned for sure that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, and because of this, they are also wondering where the antimatter went, if any was left over from the beginning of the universe.
[change] Uses
Because antimatter can make so much energy, it can be used for a lot of things, such as fuel for going into outer space, or in our cars. The problem is that antimatter is very very expensive to make, and is almost as expensive to store, since it cannot touch regular matter. Since it is so expensive to make (it takes several hundred million dollars to make less than one-millionth of a gram), this does not allow antimatter to be used as a weapon, because so little of it is available, and right now, it is not being used to create energy.
It does have a use in medicine, because a special kind of scanner called the PET, which stands for positron emission tomography, uses positrons to go into the human body. When the positron changes into energy inside a person's body, the way the energy is picked up can tell if something is wrong inside a person that other things, such as an X-ray machine or an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine cannot see.
