FIRST results have been announced from one of the most promising experiments on the International Space Station. The project studies a type of matter called a “dusty plasma”, which contains particles big enough to be seen and tracked with video cameras. The plasma structures created, some never seen before on Earth, will help scientists to test their ideas about conventional solids, whose atoms are too small to watch.
Plasmas, known as the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases, consist of clouds of charged particles. Generally these particles are single ions or electrons, but in dusty plasmas the…
