Dying stars in a grain of sand
Tuesday 12 March 2013
A team of scientists led by the University of Surrey has been able to reproduce the conditions in one of the most hostile environments in the galaxy. You can read the full research paper in Nature Communications.
Near to the surface of a white dwarf star, the dead embers left after Sun-like stars have exhausted their fuel, there are very high gravitational forces, very high temperatures, and occasionally very high magnetic fields. Sometimes these fields are thought to reach levels a billion times stronger than the Earth’s. Extreme environments like this are common in space but often difficult or impossible to reproduce on Earth. The team discovered that ordinary silicon crystals of the same type used to make computer chips are so sensitive to the effects of a magnetic field that they could achieve the same conditions as on the most magnetic white dwarf. They found that in these conditions, the electron cloud around a hydrogen atom was changed to a variety of patterns from fans to highly elongated lumpy pencil shapes. Ellis Bowyer, a doctoral researcher from Surrey who did the experiments said “it’s not just about astronomy – there are also practical implications. Learning how to control the shapes of tiny electron clouds in silicon chips is letting us design new kinds of computer chips, called quantum computers, where the transistors contain just one atom”.
