When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Simulation of an initially uniform beam of electrons & positrons interacting with a plasma. As the beam travels through the background plasma, the positrons (red) become focused while the electrons (blue) spread out to form a surrounding cloud. This illustrates the physics behind ‘current filamentation instability’, which is believed to play a key role in the propagation and dynamics of cosmic jets. The simulation was performed with the OSIRIS Particle-in-Cell code and is among the largest ever carried out for such beam-plasma interactions. | Credit: Pablo J. Bilbao & Luís O. Silva (GoLP, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon &University of Oxford). In a first-of-its-kind experiment, scientists have recreated “cosmic fireballs” here on Earth in a particle accelerator.The experiment aimed to investigate the stability of jets of high-temperature gas or plasma blasted at Earth by feeding supermassive black hole-powered galactic engines called blazars. This could, in turn, solve the mystery of hidden magnetic fields and missing high-energy gamma-rays.Scientists from the University of Oxford and the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) teamed up and turned to the Super Proton Synchrotron based at CERN’s HiRadMat (High-Radiation to Materials) facility to generate electron–positron pairs. They then blasted these matter-antimatter counterpart pairs through 3.3 feet (1 meter) of plasma, recreating conditions in the jets of feeding supermassive black holes known as blazars. This enabled them to simulate some of the universe’s most extreme physics.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement”These experiments demonstrate how laboratory astrophysics can test theories of the high-energy universe,” Bob Bingham, team member and researcher at the University of Strathclyde, said in a statement. “By reproducing relativistic plasma conditions in the lab, we can measure processes that shape the evolution of cosmic jets and better understand the origin of magne …
