Tiny special materials may mimic astronomical events, including the trapping of light in black holes and the disruption of planetary orbits, a new report in the September Nature Physics proposes. The shape and design of such materials may allow scientists to do previously impossible experiments by replicating aspects of the heavens at the laboratory bench.
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“Astrophysicists build a telescope and watch the sky, and if they’re lucky, in their lives, they’ll see one or two events,” says study coauthor Xiang Zhang, of the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Now you don’t have to wait 100 years to observe interesting phenomena. Now we can study it in a tabletop experiment.”
Zhang and his colleagues propose to mimic the cosmos using a breed of man-made materials that twist and contort light and other electromagnetic waves in unusual ways. These materials, known as metamaterials, guide light in directions that normal materials can’t.