The miniature sun mimicked the whirling plasma cloud by using sound
waves.
To better understand the origins of severe space weather, physicists have
built a miniature sun with its own artificial gravity.
The small sun created sound waves that restrained the spinning plasma
similarly to how gravity restrains the real sun, which is made up of a
superheated plasma inside of a 1-inch-wide (3-centimeter) glass
sphere.
According to a research published Jan. 20 in the journal
Physical Review Letters, studying this mini-sun might aid scientists in forecasting the severe
stellar occurrences that can disrupt power supplies, the internet, and even
send satellites hurtling toward Earth .
According to
main research
author
John Koulakis, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), "Sound
fields operate like gravity, at least when it comes to promoting convection
in gas" (opens in new tab). We created a gravitational field that is 1,000
times greater than Earth's gravity by using microwave-generated sound in a
spherical flask of heated plasma.
crazy solar weather
The sun is a massive ball of plasma with swirling charged ions that produce
strong magnetic fields. Sometimes these fields coil into knots before
abruptly breaking to generate solar flares or massive plumes of solar
material known as coronal mass ejections because magnetic field lines cannot
cross one another (CMEs). Once they are created, CMEs move at speeds of
millions of miles per hour, collecting charged particles from the solar wind
to create a massive, coupled wavefront that may cause geomagnetic storms if
it is oriented toward Earth.
It's not quite understood how and when these storms exactly arise. Previous
attempts to mimic the circumstances in the sun's core have had varying
degrees of success, mostly because the Earth's gravity has a tendency to
interfere with the mimicked effects and change them in unexpected
ways.
The physicists confined sulfur gas within a glass sphere and then blasted
it with microwaves to turn it into a burning plasma with a temperature of
5,000 degrees Fahrenheit in order to shed some light on the problem (2,760
degrees Celsius). In place of gravity, the whirling, ionized gas created
sound waves that constrained the burning mixture into patterns strikingly
like the plasma flows seen on the surface of the sun and those anticipated
by theory. Scientists think that by photographing these flows, they may
learn more about the inner workings of our star.
The next step, according to the researchers, will be to scale up their
experiment so they can watch the gas whirl for extended periods of time and
more accurately mimic the circumstances on the sun.
Seth Putterman, a UCLA professor of physics and the study's senior author, said in a
statement, "People were so interested in trying to model spherical
convection with laboratory experiments that they actually put an experiment
in the space shuttle because they couldn't get a strong enough central force
field on the ground." "We demonstrated that the gravity produced by our
system of microwave-generated sound was so strong that it did not affect the
situation. These tests may now be conducted on Earth without traveling to
space."
Astronomers have been monitoring the increase and fall of solar activity
since 1775, and it follows an approximately 11-year pattern. Recent solar
activity has been very strong, with roughly twice as many sunspots than
predicted by NOAA
(opens in new tab). The heightened activity has caused radio blackouts, the
destruction of Starlink satellites, and auroras as far south as
Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon
by hurling waves of high-energy plasma and X-ray bursts into Earth's
magnetic fields (opens in new tab). Many more flares are projected to strike
Earth in the upcoming years, with the sun's activity expected to reach its
peak in 2025.
The 1859 Carrington Event, which produced about the same amount of energy
as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs, was the biggest solar storm in recent
memory. After crashing with Earth, the strong stream of solar particles
destroyed telegraph networks all across the world and caused auroras to
shine as far south as the Caribbean that were brighter than the full moon's
brightness.
Scientists warn that if a comparable incident occurred now, it would result
in extensive blackouts, cost trillions of dollars in damage, and put
thousands of lives in danger.
According to NASA, a powerful solar storm in 1989 unleashed a billion-ton cloud of gas that
resulted in a complete blackout of the Canadian province of Quebec .
However, this could only be the beginning of what our star might throw at
us. Researchers are also looking into the reasons for a string of abrupt and
enormous radiation spikes seen in ancient tree rings throughout Earth's
history. Although solar storms 80 times more strong than the Carrington
Event are a leading idea for the origin of the spikes, scientists have not
completely ruled out the possibility of another unidentified cosmic
cause.
