If you've ever poured milk into a cup of coffee and watched it swirl, you've seen turbulence in action. This phenomenon is responsible for everything from a bumpy airplane trip to ocean currents. Now, researchers have developed a way to visualize in unprecedented detail the turbulence within the interstellar medium — the clouds of gas and charged particles between stars — and how it interacts with magnetic fields.
The model was described in a paper published May 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy. "This is the first time we can study these phenomena at this level of precision and at these different scales," James Beattie, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto and Princeton University, and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.
