In movies, a strong acid is something that’ll quickly eat through a body in a bathtub, or the deck of a spaceship. But chemists measure acidity more precisely – as the ability to donate protons to a chemical reaction – and they normally measure it on the pH scale from 7 (neutral water) to 0 (sulphuric acid).
But fluoroantimonic acid blows right past this and is 10 quadrillion times more acidic than sulphuric acid. It’s so reactive that it explodes on contact with water and even eats through glass. So it has to be dissolved in hydrofluoric acid (itself a very strong acid) and stored in a PTFE (Teflon) container.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Sam Riddle) 'What's the strongest acid in the world?'
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