• Question: how do you make a VERY BIG BOMB

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      The biggest bomb ever made was the Tsar Bomba which was a Russian Hydrogen bomb detonated in 1961. The energy of the bomb was equivalent to something like 58 million tonnes of dynamite – that is a lot!

      Hydrogen bombs work by fusing atoms of Hydrogen together to form Helium, a process which liberates huge amounts of energy. This is the same process that goes on in the core of the Sun and makes the Sun shine (so the Sun is basically a giant nuclear bomb!). In practice, bombs as big as the Tsar Bomba don’t just use nuclear fusion for their energy, they also include a part which is made of a fissionable material like Uranium. Fissionable means that it can be split to form smaller atoms, in most cases Uranium “fissioned” to make Barium and Krypton. Again, this splitting of the Uranium atoms liberates huge amounts of energy (slightly less than the Hydrogen fusion, but fission is easier to do). So, big bombs like the Tsar Bomba combine the powers of nuclear fission and fusion, breaking apart and smashing together atoms, to liberate the huge amounts of energy that cause all the damage.

    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hi 12pearj! For a really big bomb you have to go down the route of a nuclear bomb that Dave has described. Other types of high explosives are plastic explosives. Did you know that Alfred Nobel, the guy who gave us the Nobel prize, invented the first plastic explosive?!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      with a lot of highly explosive material 😛

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      The BIGEST EXPLOSION EVER would most certainly be a supernovae explosion 🙂 It happens when a star explodes at the end of its life and it’s SO big that it outshines an ENTIRE galaxy, and it’s estimated to give the energy equivalent to 10 octillion million tons of TNT!!!
      But that (obviously) didn’t happen on the Earth! Here, on Earth, Dave is right, the Tsar Bomb is the biggest bomb ever exploded. If you want to have a look at what is was like:

      Well, i’m not an expert, but I am asking the question to the expert Greig. If there was a way to make a large amount of anti-matter (say, I don’t know, it quantum tunnels or it’s a very large vacuum fluctuation, since I know it’s not possible to produce it or contain it in large amounts – at the moment or in the foreseeable future), presumably that would release even MORE energy than an H bomb, right?

      I’m thinking about this because what you use to know how much energy a nuclear bomb releases is E=mc^2, and the mass is never completely converted in energy in fusion or fission, just a small fraction of it. But with antimatter-matter collision, you do convert close to 100% of the mass into energy

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