Scientists have a problem when it comes to modeling space events inside laboratories: Earth's gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to replicate environments away from our planet.
A recently proposed solution takes the form of a tiny glass ball a mere 3 centimeters in diameter. In spite of its size, the ball simulates key forces surrounding giant planets and stars rather well.
By using sound waves as a substitute for gravitational forces, researchers can gather crucial data on the formation and behavior of space weather"Sound fields act like gravity, at least when it comes to driving convection in gas,""With the use of microwave-generated sound in a spherical flask of hot plasma, we achieved a gravity field that is 1,000 times stronger than Earth's gravity.
Sulfur gas inside the ball was heated up to a temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce sound waves that acted like an extremely strong gravitational pull, generating currents in the hot, weakly ionized gas .The end result was plasma convection, where gas cools as it nears the surface of a body such as a planet, before dropping back towards the core, where it reheats and rises again.
"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,"
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