Jacob Aron, reporter
If you jiggle a dish of liquid in just the right way, you might start seeing stars. Jean Rajchenbach and colleagues at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in Nice, France, have discovered that shaking a tray of silicone oil up and down with a slow but regular motion produces star-shaped waves with five or six sides.
These unusual patterns are thought to spring out of non-linear interactions between three separate waves, but the mathematics behind the shapes is poorly understood. Weirdly, the star-shaped waves emerge in containers of different shapes and sizes, suggesting they are not affected by a container's edge - which usually explains a wave's shape. "It is extremely amazing," says Rajchenbach.
The team is currently developing a complete theoretical model to describe the phenomenon. According to Rajchenbach, the wave shapes could be related to quasicrystals, strange arrangements of atoms that give rise to a structure with five-fold symmetry.
The work will be presented at the fluid dynamics division meeting of the American Physical Society in San Diego, California, next month.
If you enjoyed this post, see how X and Y-shaped waves can form in the ocean or check out the wave patterns that can appear in a glass of wine.
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