How did the universe get its Magnetism?

Magnetism is a force that exists throughout the vast universe. It is a phenomenon that helps in most of our daily jobs. Without it, there would be no motors, no generators, and no transformers. And without these it’s hard to imagine the world we live in. The question is: What is the origin of these magnetic fields and how did they become so strong?

The left side is a laser-produced shock wave and the right is a simulation of a collapsing shock wave arising during the pre-galactic phase.(Image courtesy of Sciencedaily.com)

In a report published in the journal “Nature”, a team lead by physicists from Oxford University, have used laser to give some light into the question. They used a high-power laser to explode a rod of carbon in the presence of helium gas. This is said to mimic the cauldron of plasma (an ionized gas of free electrons and positive ions) out of which the first galaxies formed. They found out that within a microsecond of the explosion, strong electron currents and magnetic fields were generated around a shock wave.

When these results were scaled through 22 orders-of-magnitude, astrophysicists found out that the results matched the “magnetic seeds” predicted by the studies done on galaxy. Magnetic seeds are tiny magnetic fields and is predicted that these fields can be amplified turbulent motions and can strongly affect the changes that occurred in the galactic medium starting from its initial stages.

“Our experiment recreates what was happening in the early Universe and

shows how galactic magnetic fields might have first appeared,” said Dr Gianluca

The tests were carried out at the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation de Lasers Intenses laser facility in France.

Gregori who led the work at Oxford. ‘It opens up the exciting prospect that we will be able to explore the physics of the cosmos, stretching back billions of years, in a laser laboratory here on Earth.

Although these tests were conducted at the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation de Lasers Intenses laser facility in France, the team plans to use the largest lasers in the world to study this interesting development.