papajimakos
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It’s no surprise that she can’t contain her excitement. She’s getting a closeup look at the physics of exploding stars, or supernovas, a phenomenon so immense that its power is difficult to put into words.
Rather than studying these explosions from a distance through telescopes, Park, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, creates something akin to these paroxysmal blasts using the world’s highest-energy lasers.
About 10 years ago, Park and colleagues embarked on a quest to understand a fascinating and poorly understood feature of supernovas: Shock waves that form in the wake of the explosions can boost particles, such as protons and electrons, to extreme energies.
Supernova shocks are considered to be some of the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe,” says plasma physicist Frederico Fiuza of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., one of Park’s collaborators.
Some of those particles eventually slam into Earth, after a fast-paced marathon across cosmic distances. Scientists have long puzzled over how such waves give energetic particles their massive speed boosts. Now, Park and colleagues have finally created a supernova-style shock wave in the lab and watched it send particles hurtling, revealing possible new hints about how that happens in the cosmos.
Bringing supernova physics down to Earth could help resolve other mysteries of the universe, such as the origins of cosmic magnetic fields. And there’s a more existential reason physicists are fascinated by supernovas. These blasts provide some of the basic building blocks necessary for our existence. “The iron in our blood comes from supernovae,” says plasma physicist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who also studies supernovas in the laboratory. “We’re literally created from stars.”
Rather than studying these explosions from a distance through telescopes, Park, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, creates something akin to these paroxysmal blasts using the world’s highest-energy lasers.
About 10 years ago, Park and colleagues embarked on a quest to understand a fascinating and poorly understood feature of supernovas: Shock waves that form in the wake of the explosions can boost particles, such as protons and electrons, to extreme energies.
Supernova shocks are considered to be some of the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe,” says plasma physicist Frederico Fiuza of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., one of Park’s collaborators.
Some of those particles eventually slam into Earth, after a fast-paced marathon across cosmic distances. Scientists have long puzzled over how such waves give energetic particles their massive speed boosts. Now, Park and colleagues have finally created a supernova-style shock wave in the lab and watched it send particles hurtling, revealing possible new hints about how that happens in the cosmos.
Bringing supernova physics down to Earth could help resolve other mysteries of the universe, such as the origins of cosmic magnetic fields. And there’s a more existential reason physicists are fascinated by supernovas. These blasts provide some of the basic building blocks necessary for our existence. “The iron in our blood comes from supernovae,” says plasma physicist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who also studies supernovas in the laboratory. “We’re literally created from stars.”
