With the aid of a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the University of Wisconsin will be constructing a facility for testing plasma-generated magnetic fields that could provide answers to their unknown properties.

According to the project’s co-director, UW physics professor Cary Forest, the astronomy and engineering departments submitted the grant last year, and the total financial aid was doubled as a result of the 2009 stimulus package.

The grant will fund UW’s Plasma Dynamo Facility and will go toward parts for construction, engineering costs and undergraduate labor.

This year, more grants were able to be fulfilled by the NSF, including a $30 million grant for the University of Chicago’s TeraGrid — a national supercomputer linking system — according to a statement from the University of Chicago.

Both Forest and UW astronomy professor Ellen Zweibel are heading the project, which will involve constructing the facility for the next two to three years with the help of undergraduates in the engineering and astronomy departments. The facility itself will be housed in Sterling Hall, Forest added.

The project pursues the discovery of more properties of plasma, commonly called the fourth state of matter. In celestial objects other than planets, plasma is thought of as creating and sustaining magnetic fields.

The basis for the facility is a spherical steel vessel three meters in diameter designed to hold a superheated plasma sample similar to interstellar plasma, according to a statement.

Forest has constructed other mechanisms that test the creation of magnetic fields based on molten metal.

“The liquid metal cores of [both] the earth and the sun have magnetic fields that were created spontaneously. [They are] an astrophysics problem yet to be solved,” Forest said.

He added the rotation of planets, stars and galaxies organize continual electric currents by conducting fluid that flows across magnetic fields. The perpetuation of magnetic fields through the process of electric currents creates what is known as a dynamo.

“I work in plasma physics, and where I started was in the area of nuclear fusion research. [UW] has a number of these labs,” Forest said. “Our goal now is to confine hot plasmas hoping to replicate conditions in the center of the sun where fusion takes place.”

This dynamo-testing facility will be the first ever constructed and will pave the way in the exploration of plasma as a catalyst for energy rather than a reducer.

UW senior and astrophysics major Fernando Cardoso is supportive of the grant-funded project.

“In space, bodies of plasma are very far away, and it would be very difficult to do experiments on them from earth,”Cardoso said. “It would require spending a lot of money to send probes out to space. In order to measure their properties, the only way is to perform experiments here [on Earth].”