Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries - Neil deGrasse Tyson (2014)

SECTION 3. WAYS AND MEANS OF NATURE

Chapter 18. COSMIC PLASMA

Only in a few cases does a medical doctor’s vocabulary overlap with that of the astrophysicist. The human skull has two “orbits” that shape the round cavities where our two eyeballs go; your “solar” plexus sits in the middle of your chest; and our eyes, of course, each have “lenses”; but our body has no quasars and no galaxies in it. For orbits and lenses, the medical and astrophysical usage resemble each other greatly. The term “plasma,” however, is common to both disciplines, yet the two meanings have nothing whatever to do with each other. A transfusion of blood plasma can save your life, but a brief encounter with a glowing blob of million-degree astrophysical plasma would leave a puff of smoke where you had just been standing.

Astrophysical plasmas are remarkable for their ubiquity, yet they’re hardly ever discussed in introductory textbooks or the popular press. In popular writings, plasmas are often called the fourth state of matter because of a panoply of properties that set them apart from familiar solids, liquids, and gases. A plasma has freely moving atoms and molecules, just like a gas, but a plasma can conduct electricity as well as lock onto magnetic fields that pass through it. Most atoms within a plasma have had electrons stripped from them by one mechanism or another. And the combination of high temperature and low density is such that the electrons only occasionally recombine with their host atoms. Taken as a whole, the plasma remains electrically neutral because the total number of (negatively charged) electrons equals the total number of (positively charged) protons. But inside, plasma seethes with electrical currents and magnetic fields and so, in many ways, behaves nothing like the ideal gas we all learned about in high-school chemistry class.

THE EFFECTS OF electric and magnetic fields on matter almost always dwarf the effects of gravity. The electrical force of attraction between a proton and an electron is forty powers of 10 stronger than their gravitational attraction. So strong are electromagnetic forces that a child’s magnet easily lifts a paper clip off a tabletop in spite of Earth’s formidable gravitational tug. Want a more interesting example? If you managed to extricate all the electrons from a cubic millimeter of atoms in the nose of the space shuttle, and if you affixed them all to the base of the launchpad, then the attractive force would inhibit the launch. All engines would fire and the shuttle wouldn’t budge. And if the Apollo astronauts had brought back to Earth all electrons from a thimbleful of lunar dust (while leaving behind on the Moon the atoms from which they came), then their force of attraction would exceed the gravitational attraction between Earth and the Moon in its orbit.

The most conspicuous plasmas on Earth are fire, lightning, the trail of a shooting star, and of course, the electric shock you get after you shuffle around on your living room carpet in your wool socks and then touch a doorknob. Electrical discharges are jagged columns of electrons that abruptly move through the air when too many of them collect in one place. Across all the world’s thunderstorms, Earth gets struck by lightning thousands of times per hour. The centimeter-wide air column through which a bolt of lightning travels becomes plasma in a fraction of a second as it is rendered aglow, having been raised to millions of degrees by these flowing electrons.

Every shooting star is a tiny particle of interplanetary debris moving so fast that it burns up in the air, harmlessly descending to Earth as cosmic dust. Almost the same thing happens to spacecraft that reenter the atmosphere. Since their occupants don’t want to land at their orbital speed of 18,000 miles per hour (about five miles per second), the kinetic energy must go somewhere. It turns into heat on the leading edge of the craft during reentry and is rapidly whisked away by the heat shields. In this way, unlike shooting stars, the astronauts do not descend to Earth as dust. For several minutes during the descent, the heat is so intense that every molecule surrounding the space capsule becomes ionized, cloaking the astronauts in a temporary plasma barrier, through which none of our communication signals can penetrate. This is the famous blackout period when the craft is aglow and Mission Control knows nothing of the astronauts’ well-being. As the craft continues to slow down through the atmosphere, the temperature cools, the air gets denser, and the plasma state can no longer be sustained. The electrons go back home to their atoms and communications are quickly restored.

WHILE RELATIVELY RARE on Earth, plasmas comprise more than 99.99 percent of all the visible matter in the cosmos. This tally includes all stars and gas clouds that are aglow. Nearly all of the beautiful photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of nebulae in our galaxy depict colorful gas clouds in the form of plasma. For some, their shape and density are strongly influenced by the presence of magnetic fields from nearby sources. The plasma can lock a magnetic field into place and torque or otherwise shape the field to its whims. This marriage of plasma and magnetic field is a major feature of the Sun’s 11-year cycle of activity. The gas near the Sun’s equator rotates slightly faster than the gas near its poles. This differential is bad news for the Sun’s complexion. With the Sun’s magnetic field locked into its plasma, the field gets stretched and twisted. Sunspots, flares, prominences, and other solar blemishes come and go as the gnarly magnetic field punches through the Sun’s surface, carrying solar plasma along with it.

Because of all the entanglement, the Sun flings up to a million tons per second of charged particles into space, including electrons, protons, and bare helium nuclei. This particle stream—sometimes a gale and sometimes a zephyr—is more commonly known as the solar wind. This most famous of plasmas is responsible for ensuring that comet tails point away from the Sun, no matter if the comet is coming or going. By colliding with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere near our magnetic poles, the solar wind is also the direct cause of auroras (the northern and southern lights), not only on Earth but on all planets with atmospheres and strong magnetic fields. Depending on a plasma’s temperature and its mix of atomic or molecular species, some free electrons will recombine with needy atoms and cascade down the myriad energy levels within. En route, the electrons emit light of prescribed wavelengths. Auroras owe their beautiful colors to these electron hijinks, as do neon tubes, fluorescent lights, as well as those glowing plasma spheres offered for sale next to the lava lamps in tacky gift shops.

These days, satellite observatories give us an unprecedented capacity to monitor the Sun and report on the solar wind as though it were part of the day’s weather forecast. My first-ever televised interview for the evening news was triggered by the report of a plasma pie hurled by the Sun directly at Earth. Everybody (or at least the reporters) was scared that bad things would happen to civilization when it hit. I told the viewers not to worry—that we are protected by our magnetic field—and I invited them to use the occasion to go north and enjoy the aurora that the solar wind would cause.

THE SUN’S RAREFIED corona, visible during total solar eclipses as a glowing halo around the silhouetted near side of the Moon, is a 5-million-degree plasma that is the outermost part of the solar atmosphere. With temperatures that high, the corona is the principal source of x-rays from the Sun, but is not otherwise visible to the human eyes. Using visible light alone, the brightness of the Sun’s surface dwarfs that of the corona, easily getting lost in the glare.

There’s an entire layer of Earth’s atmosphere where electrons have been kicked out of their host atoms by the solar wind, creating a nearby blanket of plasma we call the ionosphere. This layer reflects certain frequencies of radio waves, including those of the AM dial on your radio. Because of this property of the ionosphere, AM radio signals can reach hundreds of miles while “short wave” radio can reach thousands of miles beyond the horizon. FM signals and those of broadcast television, however, have much higher frequencies and pass right through, traveling out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).

Most plasmas are not friendly to organic matter. The person with the most hazardous job on the Star Trek television series is the one who must investigate the glowing blobs of plasma on the uncharted planets they visit. (My memory tells me that this person always wore a red shirt.) Every time this crew member meets a plasma blob, he gets vaporized. Born of the twenty-fifth century, you’d think these space-faring, star-trekking people would have long ago learned to treat plasma with respect (or to not wear red). We in the twenty-first century treat plasma with respect and we haven’t been anywhere.

IN THE CENTER of our thermonuclear fusion reactors, where plasmas are viewed from safe distances, we attempt to bring together hydrogen nuclei at high speeds and turn them into heavier helium nuclei. In so doing, we liberate energy that could supply society’s need for electricity. Problem is, we haven’t yet succeeded in getting more energy out than we put in. To achieve such high collision speeds, the blob of hydrogen atoms must be raised to tens of millions of degrees. No hope for attached electrons here. At these temperatures they’ve all been stripped from their hydrogen atoms and roam free. How might you hold a glowing blob of hydrogen plasma at millions of degrees? In what container would you place it? Even microwave-safe Tupperware will not do. What you need is a bottle that will not melt, vaporize, or decompose. As we saw briefly in Section 2, we can use the relationship between plasma and magnetic fields to our advantage and design a sort of “bottle” whose walls are intense magnetic fields that the plasma cannot cross. The economic return from a successful fusion reactor will rest in part on the design of this magnetic bottle and on our understanding of how the plasma interacts with it.

Among the most exotic forms of matter ever concocted is the newly isolated quark-gluon plasma, created by physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratories, a particle accelerator facility on New York’s Long Island. Rather than being filled with atoms stripped of their electrons, a quark-gluon plasma comprises a mixture of the most basic constituents of matter, the fractionally charged quarks and the gluons that normally hold them together to make protons and neutrons themselves. This unusual form of plasma resembles greatly the state of the entire universe, a fraction of a second after the big bang. This was about the time the observable universe could still fit within the 87-foot sphere of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Indeed, in one form or another, every cubic inch of the universe was in a plasma state until nearly 400,000 years had elapsed.

Until then, the universe had cooled from trillions of degrees down to a few thousand. The whole time, all light was scattered left and right by the free electrons of our plasma-filled universe—a state that greatly resembles what happens to light as it passes through frosted glass or the Sun’s interior. Light can travel through neither without scattering, rendering them both translucent instead of transparent. Below a few thousand degrees, the universe cooled enough for every electron in the cosmos to combine with one atomic nuclei, creating complete atoms of hydrogen and helium.

The pervasive plasma state no longer existed as soon as every electron found a home. And that’s the way it would stay for hundreds of millions of years, at least until quasars were born, with their central black holes that dine on swirling gases. Just before the gas falls in, it releases ionizing ultraviolet light that travels across the universe, kicking electrons back out of their atoms with abandon. Until the quasars were born, the universe had enjoyed the only interval of time (before or since) where plasma was nowhere to be found. We call this era the Dark Ages and look upon it as a time when gravity was silently and invisibly assembling matter into plasma balls that became the first generation of stars.