Dilithium Crystals have been around since the origins of Star Trek. They regulate matter and anti-matter in the Starship Enterprise's warp core. But what are they?

Dilithium crystals enable the Starship Enterprise to enter warp speed and travel across the universe.

Without them, matter and anti-matter in the warp core would create an annihilation reaction. Or would it?

Dr Krista Steenbergen, MacDiarmid Institute Associate Investigator and Physics lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington said if you squeeze lithium down it becomes a dilithium solid.

And she said anti-matter is a very real thing too.

"We can play around with it, particularly in particle accelerators," she said, "It is a thing that if you collide matter with anti-matter, a big one would be an electron and a positron, you get an annihilation and a large amount of energy."

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details