Astronomer Don Winget studies stars, yet his targets are never more than yards away. For the past two years, Winget and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin and Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been creating searing plasmas that are, in effect, miniature versions of white dwarfs, ancient stars that have burned up all their nuclear fuel. “Astronomy has now become an experimental science,” Winget says.
White dwarfs are the slowly dying embers of stars like our sun. With no nuclear fusion to sustain them, they collapse into Earth-size balls of tightly bound carbon and oxygen nuclei with an outer layer of hydrogen plasma (disrupted atoms). Astronomers have a lot to learn about white dwarfs, starting with the stars’ plasma exterior, since that is the only part directly visible through a telescope.
So in 2010 Winget decided to try fabricating the plasma himself. He took ...
