Black hole “plasma fireballs” created on Earth

Scientists have found a way to produce “plasma fireballs” just like those made by black holes – but here on Earth.

According to a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

This discovery could allow researchers to unlock the secrets of gamma-ray bursts and powerful jets emitted by black holes around the universe.

“This opens an entirely new frontier in laboratory astrophysics by enabling the experimental investigation of the microphysics of gamma-ray bursts or active jets of galactic nuclei,” lead study author Charles Arrowsmith, a physicist at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. .

Black holes are some of the densest objects in the universe, with a gravitational pull that even light cannot escape once it gets close enough. Plasma is a state of matter where the gas is ionized, meaning it consists of free electrons and ions. Some black holes, especially those with high rotational speeds, can produce powerful plasma jets – made up of electrons and their antimatter form positrons – that are ejected at almost the speed of light. These jets are emitted from regions near the black hole’s poles and are believed to be powered by the black hole’s magnetic fields and rotational energy.

For the first time, researchers created high-density plasma beams composed of about 10 trillion electron-positron pairs, which behave like a real plasma with wave-like properties.

“Laboratory generation of plasma ‘fireballs’ composed of matter, antimatter and photons is a research goal at the forefront of high energy density science,” Arrowsmith said. “But the experimental difficulty of producing electron-positron pairs in sufficiently high numbers has, until this point, limited our understanding to purely theoretical studies.”

The researchers hope that this achievement could help scientists better understand the physics of gamma-ray bursts and supermassive black holes found at the center of most galaxies.

“Earth-based satellites and telescopes are unable to resolve the smallest details of distant gamma-ray bursts and active outflows of galactic nuclei, and so far we can only rely on numerical simulations,” study author Gianluca Gregori , a professor of astrophysics at. The University of Oxford said in a statement. “This new approach will now enable us to test the predictions of sophisticated theoretical calculations, for example to prove how cosmic fireballs interact with the interstellar plasma that exists between stars.”

Do you have a tip for a science story that Newsweek should be covered? Do you have any questions about plasma? Tell us via science@newsweek.com.