Fatima is a physicist with the PPPL. Credit: Kiran Sudarsanan.
Researchers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have discovered a process that can cause unexplained emissions of light and heat. The process of magnetic reconnection also releases huge amounts of plasma billions of miles in length. Basic understanding of fundamental astrophysical processes can be increased by these findings.
99% of the visible universe is made up of free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei, known as the fourth state of matter. Scientists are studying the astrophysical properties of the sun and stars, as well as how to confine it within doughnut-shaped tokamaks to harness fusion reactions that produce the vast energy of the sun and stars. It could be possible to generate electricity with fusion on Earth.
Magnetic field lines can be snapped apart and reassembled. The process interests scientists because it seems to happen throughout the universe.
The researchers used a new model and gathered previously gathered data to show that magnetic fields are caused by a wiggling in the plasma. The observed heat and light are released.
The results of the accretion disk reconnection processes were reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The numerical data has been sitting there for a long time and we finally made sense of it.
The new simulations showed more detail. Other models only assume that the findings apply to the rest of the plasma, and only simulation of small portions of the plasma. "Shearing boxes give guidance, but they aren't the whole story," said Ebrahimi.
The boxes don't show all of the behavior. More of the in-between steps were revealed by the higher-fidelity simulation used in this research.
The lead author of the paper was a senior at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who was involved in the Student Undergraduate Laboratory internship at the DOE. The experiments were a type of research. "This was a new place for me," he said. I didn't write a research paper because I hadn't studied plasma physics in school. I was excited to get into this world.
In the future, Ebrahimi plans to explore how the magnetic field affects accretion disk turbulence and how it affects how heat, light, and motion are transmitted throughout the disk. "We hope to run larger simulations and get a better understanding of what is happening at each step," he said. You know why when you learn new physics.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters has more information about the Onset of plamoid reconnection. There is a DOI called 10.3847/2041-8213.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters contains information.
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