You’ve probably never heard of a magnetar, but in short, a magnetar is a strange type of neutron star whose magnetic field is about a trillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.
To put its power into perspective, if you were to approach a magnetar about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away, your entire body would be destroyed.
Its unimaginably powerful field will rip electrons from your atoms, turning you into a cloud of monatomic ions – single atoms without electrons – like Earth’s skyNotes.
However, scientists have just discovered that there may be regions, on our beloved planet, where magnetic flashes explode with such force that they make magnetars appear very weak.
How is this possible? you ask. Well, the answer is unclear.
It started at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Or, more specifically, in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
Scientists can trace the paths of particles emerging from heavy ion collisions at RHIC(Roger Stoutenberg and Jane Abramowitz/Brookhaven National Laboratory)
After smashing different heavy ion nuclei together in this massive particle accelerator, physicists at Brookhaven Laboratory found evidence of the existence of scalar magnetic fields.
Now, by measuring the movement of even smaller particles – quarks (the basic unit of all visible matter in the universe) and gluons (the “glue” that holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons) – scientists hope to gain new information. Deep insight into how atoms work.
It is important to note that besides these two elementary particles, there are antiquarks.
For each “flavor” of quark, there is an antiquark, which has the same rest mass and energy as its counterpart, but opposite charge and quantum number.
The lifetime of quarks and antiquarks in nuclear particles is very short. But the more we can understand how they move and interact, the better experts will be at understanding how matter – and the entire universe – formed.
To map the activity of these fundamental particles, physicists need very strong magnetic fields.
To create this, the team at Brookhaven Laboratory used RHIC to create off-center collisions of heavy atomic nuclei – in this case, gold.
The strong magnetic field produced by this process produces electric currents in the quarks and gluons that are “liberated” from the protons and neutrons that separate during the collision.
The result is that experts have now found a new way to study the electrical conductivity of “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP) – the state in which quarks and gluons escape from colliding protons and neutrons – that will help improve our understanding of these things. The basic ingredients of life.
Collisions of heavy ions produce very strong electromagnetic fields(Tiffany Bowman and Jane Abramowitz/Brookhaven National Laboratory)
“This is the first measurement of how magnetic fields interact with quark-gluon plasma (QGP),” said Duo Chen, a physicist at China’s Fudan University and leader of the new analysis. permission.
Indeed, measuring the effects of off-center collisions on flowing particles is the only way to provide direct evidence of the existence of these powerful magnetic fields.
Experts have long believed that off-center collisions would produce strong magnetic fields, but for many years this was impossible to prove.
This is because things happen very quickly in heavy ion collisions, meaning the field doesn’t last long.
By not long, we mean it disappears within a ten-millionth of a million-billionth of a second, which definitely makes it hard to notice.
However, no matter how fast the world is, it must be very powerful. This is because some of the positively charged protons and non-colliding neutral neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus are thrown out, creating a magnetic vortex so powerful that it produces more gauss (a unit of magnetic induction) than a neutron star.
“This fast-moving positive charge should produce a very strong magnetic field, estimated to be 1018 gauss,” explains UCLA physicist Gang Wang.
For comparison, he notes, neutron stars – the densest objects in the universe – have magnetic fields of about 1,014 gauss, while refrigerator magnets produce magnetic fields of about 100 gauss, and Earth’s protective magnetic field is only 0.5 gauss.
This means that the magnetic field generated by the collision of off-center heavy ions “is probably the strongest in our universe,” Wang said.
The resulting magnetic field is much larger than the magnetic field of a neutron star (I stock)
However, as we explained previously, scientists have not been able to measure the field directly. So, they instead observed the collective motion of charged particles.
“We wanted to see whether charged particles produced by off-center heavy ion collisions were deflected in a way that could only be explained by the presence of electromagnetic fields in the tiny QGP spots that appeared in the collisions,” said Aihong Tang. , a Brookhaven Laboratory physicist.
The team tracked the collective motion of pairs of differently charged particles while ruling out the influence of competing non-electromagnetic influences.
“Ultimately, we see a charge-dependent deflection pattern that can only be stimulated by the electromagnetic field in the QGP – a clear sign of Faraday induction (the law stating that changes in magnetic flux induce an electric field),” Tang emphasized.
Now that scientists have proof that magnetic fields generate electromagnetic fields in QGP, they can examine QGP’s conductivity.
“This is a basic and important characteristic,” Shen said. “We can deduce the conductivity value from the collective motion measurements we made.
“The degree of particle deflection is directly related to the strength of the electromagnetic field and the conductivity of the QGP, and no one has measured the conductivity of the QGP before.”
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2024-02-27 18:58:55
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