Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have used advanced plasma simulations to show how large-scale magnetic fields arise from turbulent flows in space. The findings were published in the journal Nature. They offer a new explanation for ordered magnetic structures observed across the universe.
The study was led by Bindesh Tripathi, a former University of Wisconsin-Madison physics graduate student now at Columbia University, with senior author Paul Terry, a physics professor at UW-Madison. The team ran roughly 90 simulations on Purdue University's Anvil supercomputer, using 137 billion grid points in three-dimensional space. This produced 0.25 petabytes of data and required nearly 100 million CPU hours.