Dance within the drop of water

2001/09/24 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Fisika
• Hidrologia

The movement of the liquid not captured by a photograph has been captured by nuclear magnetic resonances.

In meteorology, the formation of water drops and its movement in the interior of the liquid is particularly important once generated. But that is very difficult to investigate. Although any type of gout can be formed in the laboratory, there is no simple technique to initiate research into the interior of gout. It is usually a matter of studying this type of dynamics through photographs, but this method is not usually very suitable with the drops of water that are about to fall.

However, a group of German researchers find a surprise. Instead of taking pictures of the drops, they have been analyzed using nuclear magnetic resonances. When investigating the drops, the problem of this technique is speed. The only image made with resonance takes a lot to obtain, so you can get a single image of each drop. Without great expectations, the researchers made resonances of many drops.

However, in all the drops the convection currents were equal, so it was easy to model the movement of the liquid within the gout.