{"id":231349,"date":"2026-02-14T05:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T11:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/chemical-reaction-pattern-shines-like-the-sun"},"modified":"2026-02-14T05:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T11:26:11","slug":"chemical-reaction-pattern-shines-like-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/chemical-reaction-pattern-shines-like-the-sun","title":{"rendered":"Chemical Reaction Pattern Shines Like the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For a phenomenon like a wildfire burning through a forest or a disease moving through a population, the resulting patterns can sometimes be modeled using a so-called reaction\u2013diffusion system\u2014an experiment where a chemical reaction front moves through a region full of reactants. Now Anne De Wit of the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles and her colleagues have demonstrated that new patterns can be revealed when the reactants flow against the direction of the front\u2019s propagation, causing it to freeze in place [1<\/a>]. Their \u201csun-ray\u201d pattern is the first one discovered this way, but the technique could generate other patterns that might replicate behavior in forest fires or epidemics.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, De Wit and her colleagues brought a propagating reaction front to a standstill by slowly and continually injecting a reactant into the center of a disk-shaped chamber filled with the other reactant, against the front\u2019s inward propagation [2<\/a>]. The stopping occurred when the outward flow matched the rate at which the inner reactant was consumed. De Wit says that a stationary front allows more control and thus more careful study of patterns than a propagating front.<\/p>\n

As a demonstration of this control, the researchers have now used reactants with different diffusion rates in the same outward-flow setup. In this case, the stationary front developed ripples\u2014an effect previously seen in propagating fronts. The researchers also observed radial \u201crays\u201d\u2014narrow regions of higher concentration of one of the reactants. They showed in simulations and experiments that properties of the front can be precisely controlled by varying the flow rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a phenomenon like a wildfire burning through a forest or a disease moving through a population, the resulting patterns can sometimes be modeled using a so-called reaction\u2013diffusion system\u2014an experiment where a chemical reaction front moves through a region full of reactants. Now Anne De Wit of the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles and her colleagues [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}