Incredible Images Unveil Complicated Patterns in Supersonic Plasma

The most detailed simulation yet of the chaotic supersonic plasma floating throughout the universe has revealed a complex map of swirling magnetic fields.

Clouds of charged particles, or plasma, exist throughout the universe, on scales as small as the solar wind or spanning vast distances such as entire galaxies. These clouds experience turbulence, just like the air in Earth's atmosphere, which determines important properties of the universe, such as how the magnetic field varies over space and how quickly stars form.

However, the inherent chaotic nature of turbulence and the mixing of vastly different plasma velocities makes it impossible to accurately predict the plasma's behavior mathematically.

now, James Beatty Researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra and their colleagues used the SuperMUC-NG supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Germany to carry out the largest chaotic plasma simulation of its kind.

The researchers trapped the plasma on a grid of 10,000 cubes and artificially stirred it, like stirring a coffee cup, to see how the turbulence rippled—a simulation that would take 10,000 years to run on a standard single-core computer, Beatty says.

In one great slice of the simulation grid above, you can see the complex structure of the plasma. The top half of the image shows the charge density, with red areas representing high density and blue areas representing low density. The bottom half of the image shows the gas density, with yellow-orange representing high density and green representing low density. The white lines show the contours of the resulting magnetic field lines.

Beatty said the simulations not only taught researchers how plasma normally moves in space, but also yielded an unexpected result: The team learned that unlike the swirls in a cup of coffee, which should travel from the large-scale vortexes down to the atoms themselves, the magnetic field movement from the massive plasma doesn't extend down to the smallest scales.

“The large-scale and small-scale mixing characteristics appear to be very different,” Beatty says. “In fact, the small scale is much less turbulent than expected.”