Question: does there actually have an acid that burns through everything?
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So far, all the acids known don’t burn through everything like you see in the movies. They do get corrosive and can start dissolving all sorts of things like glass but usually there is some sort of container that can hold them.
And it’s not just acids that are corrosive. Bases can be just as corrosive and also need to be handled with care and stored carefully.
There would be a bit of a problem with an acid which burned through everything. It would burn straight through any container, then through the Earth, then through anything else it came into contact with out there in the Universe. So we would never see it because it would probably have dissolved the Earth by now then disappeared off into space.
There are a lot of very corrosive acids which can burn through different materials. Sulfuric acid burns organic material, such as animals and plants, but can be kept inside glass. Hydrofluoric acid dissolves glass but can be kept in plastic containers. These two acids are some of the most corrosive acids known and even they are not uncontainable.
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Yeah – it’s not likely. The only thing I know that burns through everything is the sun. And that’s safely far away.
The acids Aimee mentions are nasty things, no question, but it’s possible to handle them. There are things called superacids you can make with exotic elements like fluorine and antimony, and these things can be billions upon billions of times stronger acids than concentrated sulfuric acid. They can do weird things and “dissolve” a lot of containers. But there will be something you can hold it in. Fluorine gas itself is difficult to handle because it’s so reactive, but it’s possible – doesn’t react too well with gold, for example, so you could have a gold tin of fluorine gas.
Probably the most difficult thing to handle (but which isn’t an acid) is antimatter. Antimatter reacts with matter and produces energy in a big flash. Basically impossible to store, since any object will react with it. So that would technically “burn” through anything. But that’s a physics thing, not a chemistry thing, so is cheating.
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