Scientists created a spinning plasma disk in the laboratory, transferring the immediate vicinity of a black hole to Earth. This ring of superheated gas simulates matter swirling around the edges of black holes in so-called “accumulation disks” that gradually feed matter into black holes. An experiment led by researchers at Imperial College London could help scientists answer the question of how black holes grow by absorbing the matter that surrounds them.

“Understanding how accretion disks behave will help us learn not only how black holes grow, but also how gas clouds collapse to form stars, and even how we can better create our own stars by understanding the stability of plasma in fusion experiments,” said Vicente Valenzuela. Villaseca, lead study author and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, said in a statement.

Plasma disks around black holes have been immortalized when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) looks for the first time direct image of a black hole. In this historic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, and in a later images of a supermassive black hole inside Milky Way, Shooter A* (Sgr A*) is dominated by the bright orange color. a ring of plasma surrounding a dark central black hole.

This ring is formed when matter is pulled into the black hole, and immense gravity creates turbulent and turbulent conditions by heating the gas and stripping electrons from the atoms that make up it. This turns the gas into a plasma, a sea of ​​electronless atoms or ions and electrons. This plasma forms an accretion disk that is held out by the centrifugal force generated by its rotation and internal gravitational force.

This stability is occasionally disrupted, causing material from the disk to fall onto the black hole’s surface, but scientists know exactly how the instabilities occur. This is important for our understanding of black holes because they cannot grow without accumulating some material.

It’s unlikely for scientists to reproduce a black hole like M87, which is 4.5 billion times its mass. Sun. This means that the next best thing these cosmic titans can do to study their environment up close and personal is to recreate the plasma that swirls around them.

The team used the Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Explosion Experiments (MAGPIE) to spin the plasma and create an exact replica of the accretion disks. This required eight plasma jets to be accelerated and collided to form a rotating column. The team found that the plasma moves faster in the interior regions of the smoke, which is thought to be an important feature of the accretion disks.

Despite the potential for better simulation of accretion disks, the experiment is only a proof of concept, as MAGPIE can only produce short plasma pulses and does not limit the team’s observations to more than one full rotation of the disk. Repeating the experiment with longer plasma pulses should allow the team to better characterize the accumulation discs.

One of the mechanisms proposed to cause instability in these plasma disks is friction-inducing magnetic fields that cause matter to lose energy, causing it to build up on the surface of black holes. Longer pulses of plasma in the lab will allow magnetic fields to enter the system, allowing researchers to test this mechanism.

“We’re starting to look at these accretion disks in a whole new way, including our experiments with the Event telescope and black hole images. Horizon Telescopesaid Valenzuela-Villaseca. “This will allow us to test our theories and see if they agree with astronomical observations.”