First Direct Evidence of Turbulence in Space

By Aussiegirl

From Wikipedia's article I learned that turbulence is an impenetrably difficult problem in physics -- which doesn't stop physicists from joking about it: Like the three-body problem in gravitation, turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics. According to an apocryphal story Werner Heisenberg was asked what he would ask God, given the opportunity. His reply was: "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." A similar witticism has been attributed to Horace Lamb (who had published a noted text book on Hydrodynamics)—his choice being quantum mechanics (instead of relativity) and turbulence. Lamb was quoted as saying in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, "I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic."

(For the Wikipedia articles on the three-body problem in gravitation and the unsolved problems in physics, see here and here.)

(And here is the description of the illustration: Turbulence in space has been directly measured by a suite of 4 satellite detectors, called Cluster, which are positioned just outside the bow shock ahead of Earth’s magnetosphere. Cluster measures rapid variations in the magnetic field as solar wind particles arrive in Earth’s vicinity.)

Physics news Update 802

First Direct Evidence of Turbulence in Space

If you think chaos is complicated in the case of simple objects (such as our inability to predict the longterm velocities and positions of planets owing to their nonlinear interactions with the sun and other planets) it's far worse for systems with essentially an infinite number of degrees of freedom such as fluids or plasmas under the stress of nonlinear forces. Then the word turbulence is fully justified.

Turbulence can be studied on Earth easily by mapping such things as the density or velocity of fluids in a tank. In space, however, where we expect turbulence to occur in such settings as solar wind, interstellar space, and the accretion disks around black holes, it's not so easy to measure fluids in time and space. Now, a suite of four plasma-watching satellites, referred to as Cluster, has provided the first definitive study of turbulence in space.

The fluid in question is the wind of particles streaming toward the Earth from the sun, while the location in question is the region just upstream of Earth's bow shock, the place where the solar wind gets disturbed and passes by the Earth's magnetosphere (see figure at Physics News Graphics). The waves in the shock-upstream plasma, pushed around by complex magnetic fields, are observed to behave a lot like fluid turbulence on Earth.

One of the Cluster researchers, Yasuhito Narita (y.narita@tu-bs.de) of the Institute of Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics in Braunschweig, Germany, says that the data is primarily in accord with the leading theory of fluid turbulence, the so called Kolmogorov's model.