I remember the day when older, more experienced captains stopped grumbling about me to the effect of, “She's got about enough experience to be doing what she started doing – pulling space junk together to get it blown up, but Admiral Triefield and Admiral Banneker are her mentors, and so...”
That all stopped when Admiral Vlarian Triefield finally called the captains, commodores, and rear admirals of the fleet working on the aftermath of a great anti-matter trans-warp accident to see the imaging of the explosion that ended it all, and then said, “If I had it to order again, who would you have but Capt. Khadijah Biles-Dixon collect matter to defuse an anti-matter bubble?”
Even for a modern starship, it is not an easy thing to create an image of what happens when a a large, roughly equal amount of matter and anti-matter collides and explodes. A warp core breach on a starship can be imaged easily, and in fact has sadly been many times – that just goes to show how destructive a small amount of anti-matter neutralizing the equivalent amount of matter can be to all the matter nearby. But in that case, most of what is seen is the disordering of the remaining matter that used to be a ship.
The process is entirely different should you have the situation of getting a mass of space junk the size of Jupiter together to meet a blob of anti-matter that used to be a comet about the size of Jupiter – this gives one the possibilities of an equal conversion to get images of.
The next problem, of course, was the brightness and power of that explosion – it would be like attempting to film a kilonova or supernova up close, with the complexity of anti-matter not being “naturally” visible. To the naked eye and even to standard sensor tunings, all that was visible was the sudden dissolution of the matter at hand.
However, after many months, the fleet found a way to make an image we could work with of the first nano-second of the collision, and it turned out that the images were mirror twins of sorts! The one above shows the breaking of the force fields and the spreading of the matter out because of the force of the collision, and the collapsing of that matter into black holes already forming their own orbits. The one below shows the anti-matter forming white holes all along the same lines.
The result after the massive explosion: nothing. The first Law of Thermodynamics states that matter can neither be created or destroyed, and that applies to all normal conditions in space-time. The law remains in force with the extension of understanding that in the presence of anti-matter, matter can be “absorbed” and moved out of this region of space-time. This has been confirmed by the Uppaaimar, in both their ancient texts and their returning modern civilization – they have shown evidence that for every black hole, there is a white hole that pushes out all the matter that said black hole takes in elsewhere in the universe.
This of course begs the question of where all that space junk's matter load went once it vanished from that region of the Milky Way, and the Uppaaimarn answer would be to turn our attention to the resonances between stars that exist throughout the Great Attractor and to discover what region corresponds as the receiver for that portion of the Milky Way's natural black holes – but that is still far, far beyond the capacity of human consideration, not least because human commanders have to be worried about things like who gets credit for taking out the garbage.
“99.999999875 percent complete absorption of all available matter,” one of my complaining colleagues said, his mouth dropping open as the computer posted up the number.
“That's still about a kiloton of space dust left over, Captain Biles-Dixon,” Admiral Triefield said. “I'm not going to reprimand you for leaving a kiloton of space dust out of a mass the size of Jupiter, but I would like you to explain how that variance came to be.”
“Certainly, Madame Admiral,” I said. “Although it was certainly possible to have had an more even mass of matter match for the anti-matter coming to meet it, I thought it best to err on the side of caution with a slight preponderance of matter. Atomic space dust is harmless and will diffuse into the general dark matter of the galaxy, but that much remaining anti-matter would still be enough to destroy several starships and seriously damage a planet. Our estimates about the size of the comet originally and that of the anti-matter blob it was transmuted into varied by a quarter of a kiloton, so, I calculated that a kiloton of extra matter would be sufficient no matter which estimate turned out to be correct.”
“And it was – there is not a particle of anti-matter left in the target area,” the admiral purred. “Well done, Captain, and a further commendation to your imaging crew for doing the complex foundational legwork of making visible what is naturally invisible.”
“I will pass on your commendation, ma'am, and thank you on my crew's behalf. All of them did a magnificent job.”
As we left the briefing, the usual complainers were silent … I suppose they didn't know how good you had to be as a captain to collect trash on my level, but they knew now!
“What I love about being on the science track,” I said as we all queued up for being transported to our respective ships, “is being able to learn new things every day!”
Some of the captains responded favorably, and some of the others hadn't enjoyed their lessons at much … but they all got to see me smiling brilliantly as I disappeared in the sparkling beam of the transporter!