Researchers Create a Plasma Bubble With Lasers That Could Provide Propulsion or an Artificial Magnetosphere

There are a lot of uses for lasers. CDs worked when they were a thing. Cats and their humans get hours of entertainment. Scientists at Osaka University have found that they can create magnetic conditions similar to the Sun in a lab. That could help a lot of other scientific disciplines.

The experiment was done at the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University. If the laser is focused on the plastic, it will destroy it. It's powerful enough to turn it into a piece of electronics.

The researchers did what they were told to do. They zapped a piece of plastic with a weak magnetic field. A weak magnetic field was created by the high-energy laser blast. A situation known as a pure electron outflow was created due to a weak magnetic field.

Magnetic storms on the Sun's surface are thought to be caused by this phenomenon.

Recreating these features at a small scale in the lab has never been done before, but the researchers at Osaka think that their electron outflow created by the combination of a magnet and a laser may be the closest thing that we will have to be able to study these phenomena on Earth.

Scaling down solar physics level phenomena to a more manageable size is a step in the right direction, but pure electron flow is helpful in other areas Gekko was originally designed to work on insturment fusion, which a better understanding of electron dynamics could help to control.

The experiment shows how far we have come in understanding fundamental physics. It shows that lasers can be used for a lot more than running into a wall.

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There are direct observations of pure electron outflow in magnetic reconnection.

A laser creates a mini magnetosphere.

There is a plan to give Mars an artificial magnetosphere.

There is a magnetic bubble that protects astronauts from space radiation.