Physicists mimic the gravity inside the Sun using sound waves
Reported by Tariq Malik
Physicists have replicated the kind of gravitational field found in or near the Sun using sound waves inside a sphere of hot plasma, creating a field analogous to gravity that’s able to overcome the effect of Earth’s gravity that can drag such experiments down. The Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, is a roiling, turbulent sea of convective plasma. Plasma is ionised gas in which the atoms have been shorn of an electron, giving them an electrical charge. Hot plasma rises from deeper within the Sun to the photosphere, with cooler plasma sinking back down, where it’s reheated and recycled back to the photosphere. This convective motion is radial, outward from the centre of the Sun, but trying to replicate radial plasma fields on Earth faces one big problem: our planet’s gravity, which drags down towards Earth rather than to the centre of the plasma field in a laboratory experiment.