plasma

Future fusion reactions inside tokamaks could produce much more energy than previously thought, thanks to groundbreaking new research that found a foundational law for such reactors was wrong.  The research, led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about twice the "Greenwald Limit" – an estimate derived from experiments more than 30 years ago.The discovery that fusion reactors can actually work with hydrogen…

Fast radio bursts are one of the biggest cosmic mysteries of our time. They're extremely powerful but extremely brief explosions of electromagnetic radiation in radio wavelengths, discharging in milliseconds as much energy as 500 million Suns.  For years, scientists puzzled over what could be causing these brief outbursts, detected in galaxies millions to billions of light-years away. Then, in April 2020, we got a really strong lead: a brief, powerful flash of radio waves from something inside the Milky Way – a…

Sunspots aren't the only speckles decorating the dynamic face of our Sun. Solar physicists have made a close study of tiny, fleeting speckles of brightness that emerge and fade in less than a minute on average, in regions where loops of plasma rise from the solar surface.  They're named 'solar dots'. The fleeting phenomenon, analysis has revealed, is likely the result of magnetic shenanigans – which wouldn't be hugely surprising, given that magnetic field changes play a huge role in all sorts of wacky solar phenomena. …

Black holes are powerful cosmic engines. They provide the energy behind quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This is due to the interaction of matter with its powerful gravitational and magnetic fields.  Technically, a black hole doesn't have a magnetic field on its own, but the dense plasma surrounding the black hole as an accretion disk does. As the plasma swirls around the black hole, the charged particles within it generate an electrical current and magnetic field.The direction of the plasma flow doesn't…

Scientists at a laboratory in England have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction.The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been called "a breakthrough" by some news outlets and caused quite a lot of excitement among physicists.  But a common line regarding fusion electricity production is that it is "always 20 years away."We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer who…