Physicists Used Sound Waves to Give a Tiny Sun Its Own Kind of Gravity - ScienceAlert

Scientists have a problem when it comes to modeling space events inside laboratories: Earth's gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to replicate environments away from our planet.

By using sound waves as a substitute for gravitational forces, researchers can gather crucial data on the formation and behavior of space weather such as solar flares that have the potential to impact spaceflight, satellites, and life on Earth.

"Sound fields act like gravity, at least when it comes to driving convection in gas," says physicist John Koulakis, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

(Koulakis et al., Physical Review Letters, 2023)The end result was plasma convection, where gas cools as it nears the surface of a body such as a planet, before dropping back towards the core, where it reheats and rises again.

(Koulakis et al., Physical Review Letters, 2023)Many of the conditions inside the glass ball, such as the way the hottest plasma was held at the center of the sphere, resembled mechanisms theorized to occur in stars.

For the team, the next step is to scale up the experiment so it more closely matches the conditions in space (particularly in terms of temperature), and to investigate other aspects of the simulation.