Lasers can generate extreme states of matter
Posted by Science Oxford on November 11, 2009 | comments
A new study has shown that the extreme states of matter observed near black holes can be recreated in a lab using powerful lasers.
This results could help astrophysicists improve their models of black holes and similar astrophysical systems.
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Visit this page »Lasers can be used to generate extreme states of matter similar to those produced near a black hole, reports a study published online this week in the research journal Nature Physics.
Black holes are objects in space that are so compact, they produce a ferocious gravitational field that captures anything that strays too close, even light rays.
Albert Einstein calculated that black holes would also create severe distortions of space and time in their vicinity. Black holes are furthermore often surrounded by violent activity as stars, gas and dust are gobbled up.
But conditions around black holes have been hard to study, except from great distances. The ability to recreate these states in the laboratory makes it much easer to study the processes that occur near black holes and other similarly massive astrophysical objects, as well as to better interpret the astronomical measurements of these objects, physicists say.
Near a black hole, hot gases become ionized, or electrically charged, thanks to blasts of light from objects that heat up as they are violently sucked into the dense central mass.
These charged, hot gases, known as photoionized plasmas, give off a characteristic spectrum of X-rays that can detected by satellites orbiting Earth, according to Shinsuke Fujioka of Osaka University in Japan, one of the researchers in the new study.
But on Earth, photoionized plasmas are much harder to produce than conventional plasmas, which are gases that that become charged as hordes of atoms collide with each other or with subatomic particles called electrons.
To produce a photoionized plasma, Shinsuke Fujioka and colleagues used a 300 billion watt laser to make a thin silicon foil implode.
The researchers found that the the X-ray spectrum from the resulting plasma was remarkably similar to those measured as emanating from the binary stars Cygnus X-3—a star system believed to house a black hole—and Vela X-1, a neutron star. Neutron stars are a type of highly compact star that share some black hole-like characteristics.
The results also suggest conventional views as to how certain parts of these spectrums are formed could be wrong, Fujioka added. That could help astrophysicists improve their models of black holes and similar astrophysical systems.
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