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Imagine looking under your couch and instead of finding fluffy dust bunnies, you see that the dust is arranged in straight lines – you might wonder what is the cause of this order. Scientists experience the same feeling, not with dust under a sofa, but with electrically charged dust in the microgravity of space.
The dust that scientists are studying is tiny spheres ten times smaller than the width of a human hair. This dust is electrically charged when it collects electrons from an energy gas called plasma.
In a laboratory on Earth, electrically charged dusts usually line up either along gravity or right through. Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics and Engineering Research (CASPER) of Baylor University were surprised to study data from a number of sources. similar experiment conducted near the International Space Station at an altitude of 408 miles above the Earth, where gravity is much lower. Rather than letting the dust bounce at random, it often moved in straight lines, even without gravity.
"Gravity on Earth is at least as strong as electrical forces between dust particles, and in microgravity we would expect dust particles to disperse," said Truell Hyde, Director of CASPER, who heads the company. 39; study. "Instead, we found that the small forces between the dust particles and the atoms in the plasma impose an order on the system." Dr. Hyde and his research group present their findings at the meeting of the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society in Portland, Oregon.
The study was carried out on the PK-4 experiment (acronym for Plasma Kristall-4), carried out in the framework of a partnership between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). Research is the first such project on the space station with the direct participation of US research groups. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
It is potentially important to learn that dust grains align in microgravity to understand how groups of things are structured. At small sizes, the forces between atoms provide the structure for molecules and proteins, while in very large sizes, gravity provides the structure for stars and galaxies. Hyde said, "This experience can help explain how structures are formed between very small and very large sizes."
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Material provided by American Physical Society. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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