(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists have a problem when it comes to simulating cosmic events in labs: Earth‘s gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to reproduce environments away from our planet.
A recently proposed solution takes the form of a tiny glass ball just 3 centimeters (just over an inch) in diameter.
Despite its size, the orb does a pretty good job of simulating the underlying forces surrounding giant planets and stars.
By using sound waves instead of gravity forces, researchers can gather important data about the formation and behavior of space weather. for example, solar flares, which can affect space travel, satellites, and life on Earth.
“Sound fields act like gravity, at least when it comes to convection in a gas,” says physicist John Kulakis. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
“By using sound generated by microwaves in a spherical bulb of hot plasma, we have obtained a gravitational field that is 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s gravity. ”
The sulfur dioxide inside the balloon was heated to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 2,760 degrees Celsius) to create sound waves that acted as an extremely strong gravitational pull, creating currents in the hot, weakly ionized gas (or plasma).
The end result was plasma convection, in which the gas cools as it approaches the surface of a body, such as a planet, before falling back to the core, where it heats up again and rises again.
The flowing gas creates its own magnetic field, which in stars forms the basis of various forms of space weather.
Many of the conditions inside the glass sphere, such as the way the hottest plasma was kept at the center of the sphere, resembled the mechanisms that are supposed to occur in stars.
Such a result was previously very difficult to recreate in the laboratory, but now it has been captured on camera.
“People were so interested in trying to simulate spherical convection using laboratory experiments that they even set up an experiment.
In the space shuttle because they couldn’t create a strong enough central force field on earth,” says physicist Seth Putterman of the University of California, Los Angeles.
In fact, the study is based on the study of lamps, sound, and hot balls of gas, and not anything directly related to space.
This newfound ability to control the movement of plasma with acoustic energy could be useful in a number of other areas, including the study of our own planet.
The next step for the team is to scale up the experiment therefore, it more closely matches conditions in space (especially in terms of temperature) and explores other aspects of the simulation.
In essence, the team needs to take a closer look at the experiment and extend it.
Now there are some types of convection behavior that we observe around stars and planets that are too difficult to understand playable even on the most powerful computers. With further development, this type of experiment could take over.
“We have shown that our microwave-generated sound system creates gravity so strong that Earth’s gravity is irrelevant,” says Putterman. “We no longer need to fly into space to conduct these experiments.”
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