- 4371 - STRONGEST MAGNETIC FORCE ? - Scientists just created the strongest magnetic force in the universe. Magnetars are an exotic type of neutron star whose magnetic field is around a trillion times stronger than the Earth ’s magnetic field.
------------------- 4371 - STRONGEST MAGNETIC FORCE ?
- To illustrate the
strength of “magnetars”, if you were to get any closer to a magnetar than about
600 miles away, your body would be totally destroyed. Its unimaginably powerful field would tear
electrons away from your atoms, converting you into a cloud of monatomic ions.
single atoms without electrons.
-
- And yet, scientists
have just discovered that there could be zones, right here on our beloved
planet, where flashes of magnetism burst with strengths that make magnetars
look positively feeble.
-
- It begins at the US
Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. Or, more
specifically, at its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) . After smashing together nuclei of various
heavy ions in this massive particle accelerator, physicists at the Brookhaven
lab found evidence of record-breaking magnetic fields.
-
- By measuring the
motion of even smaller particles, quarks (the building blocks of all visible
matter in the universe) and gluons (the “glue” that binds quarks together to
form the likes of protons and neutrons) scientists hope to gain new insights
into the deep inner workings of atoms.
-
- It’s important to
note that, alongside these two elementary particles, there exist
antiquarks. For every “flavor” of quark,
there is an antiquark, which has the same mass and energy at rest as its
corresponding quark, but the opposite charge and quantum number.
-
- The lifetime of
quarks and antiquarks inside nuclear particles is brief. In order to map the activity of these
fundamental particles, physicists require a super-strong magnetic field. The Brookhaven lab used the RHIC to create
off-center collisions of heavy atomic nuclei, in this case, gold.
-
- The powerful
magnetic field generated by this process induced an electrical current in the
quarks and gluons that were “set free” from the protons and neutrons that
separated during the smashups.
-
- They now
havecreated a new way of studying the electrical conductivity of this
“quark-gluon plasma” (QGP), a state where quarks and gluons are liberated from
the colliding protons and neutrons, which will help improve our grasp of these
fundamental building blocks of life.
-
- This is the first
measurement of how the magnetic field interacts with the quark-gluon plasma
(QGP)”
-
- Measuring the
impact of these off-center collisions on the particles streaming out, is the
only way of providing direct evidence that these powerful magnetic fields
exist.
Things happen very quickly in heavy ion collisions, which
means the field doesn’t last long. It
disappears in ten millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second, which,
inevitably, makes it tricky to observe.
-
- This field is
strong. Because some of the
non-colliding positively charged protons and neutral neutrons that make up the
nuclei are sent spiraling off, resulting in an eddy of magnetism so powerful,
they deliver more gauss (the unit of magnetic induction) than a neutron star.
-
- Those fast-moving
positive charges should generate a very strong magnetic field, predicted to be
10^18 gauss.
-
- Neutron stars, the
densest objects in the universe, have fields measuring around 10^14 gauss,
while fridge magnets produce a field of about 100 gauss, and Earth’s protective
magnetic field is a mere 0.5 gauss.
-
- That means that the
magnetic field created by the off-center heavy ion collisions is probably the
strongest in our universe. The team
tracked the collective motion of different pairs of charged particles while
ruling out the influence of competing non-electromagnetic effects.
-
- They see a pattern
of charge-dependent deflection that can only be triggered by an electromagnetic
field in the QGP, a clear sign of Faraday induction (a law which states that
changing magnetic flux induces an electric field.
-
- Now that the
scientists have evidence that magnetic fields induce an electromagnetic field
in the QGP, they can investigate the QGP’s conductivity. The extent to which the particles are
deflected relates directly to the strength of the electromagnetic field and the
conductivity in the QGP.
-
-
February 29, 2024
STRONGEST MAGNETIC FORCE ?
4371
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is
interested. --------
--- Some reviews are
at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback,
corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------
jamesdetrick@comcast.net
------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
--------------------- ---
Thursday, February 29, 2024 ---------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment