/
What is Plasma?
What is Plasma?
Plasma

What is Plasma?

Solid, liquid, gas, plasma: the fourth state of matter is full of energy, more common than you'd think, and thanks to Irving Langmuir, the victim of bad marketing. An ionized gas behaves like a glowing soup of charged particles, and in 1928 Langmuir decided to call this phase "plasma" due to its supposed similarity to blood. Thus began a centuries-long tradition of plasma physicists and fusion scientists explaining that they are neither biologists nor phlebotomists.

2 min read
01

Plasma is superheated matter – so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms forming an ionized gas. It comprises over 99% of the visible universe. In the night sky, plasma glows in the form of stars, nebulas, and even the auroras that sometimes ripple above the north and south poles. That branch of lightning that cracks the sky is plasma, so are the neon signs along our city streets. And so is our sun, the star that makes life on earth possible.

Plasma is often called “the fourth state of matter,” along with solid, liquid and gas. Just as a liquid will boil, changing into a gas when energy is added, heating a gas will form a plasma – a soup of positively charged particles (ions) and negatively charged particles (electrons).

Share this article