Scientists have brought the immediate environment of a black hole to Earth by creating a spinning disk of plasma in the laboratory.
This ring of superheated gases simulates matter swirling around the edge of the black holes in so-called “accretion disks” that gradually feed matter into the black holes.
The experiment, conducted by researchers at Imperial College London, could help scientists answer the question of how black holes grow by consuming the matter that surrounds them.
“Understanding how accretion disks work will not only help us reveal how black holes grow, but also how gas clouds collapse to form.” starsAnd even how we can create our own stars better by understanding the stability of the plasma in fusion experiments,” says Vicente Valenzuela Villasica, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. he said in a statement.
Related: Black holes in the universe (photos)
Plasma disks around black holes were immortalized when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured The first direct image of a black hole.
In this historic image, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) dominates – and in Later image of the supermassive black hole In the milky wayAnd arch a* (Sgr A*) – A glowing orange ring of plasma surrounding the dark central black hole.
This loop occurs when matter is drawn into a black hole, and the massive gravitational effect creates turbulent and violent conditions, heating the gas and stripping electrons from its constituent atoms. This turns the gas into a plasma, a sea of electron-free atoms, or ions, and electrons. This plasma forms a stable accretion disk by the outward thrust of the centrifugal force generated by its rotation and the inward gravitational force.
This stability is occasionally interrupted, causing material from the disk to fall onto the surface of the black hole, but scientists are pretty sure how the instability arises. This is important to our understanding of black holes because they cannot grow without accreting some matter.
It is difficult for scientists to recreate a black hole like M87, which has a mass of 4.5 billion times the mass of a black hole the sun. This means that the best they can do in order to study the environments of these cosmic giants up close and personal is to recreate the plasma orbiting them.
The team used the Machine’s Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Immersion Experiments (MAGPIE) to spin the plasma and create an exact repeat of the accretion disks. This required eight jets of plasma to be accelerated and collided to make a spinning shaft. The team found that the plasma was moving more quickly in the inner regions of the plume, something they believe is an important property of accretion disks.
While allowing for better modeling of accretion disks, the experiment is only a proof of concept, mainly because MAGPIE can only generate short plasma pulses, which limits the team’s observations to more than one full rotation of the disk. Repeating the experiment with longer plasma pulses should allow the team to better characterize the accretion discs.
One of the proposed mechanisms that cause instability in these plasma discs is magnetic fields which lead to friction which causes energy loss in the matter causing it to accumulate at the surface of the black holes. Longer pulses of plasma in the laboratory would also allow magnetic fields to be introduced into the system allowing researchers to test this mechanism.
“We are still at the beginning of being able to look at these accretion disks in completely new ways, which includes our experiments and snapshots of black holes using Event Horizon TelescopeValenzuela Villasica said. “This will allow us to test our theories and see if they match astronomical observations.”
The team’s research is published in the journal Physical review letters.
