Space consists predominantly of ionized gas, known as plasma.
One of the outstanding issues in space plasma physics is the role of plasma waves and instabilities in the transport of mass, momentum, and energy in space plasmas. The large-scale plasma flow in space creates conditions that generate plasma waves at relatively small spatial and temporal scales. The spatial scales of the waves are typically from a few centimeters to a few hundreds of meters and the corresponding temporal scales are from a few microseconds to less than a second. On the other hand, large-scale plasma flows have scale lengths from a few thousands of kilometers to several Earth radii, and the temporal scales range from about an hour to days. Our laboratory results are verifying important aspects of a recently predicted plasma instability used in theoretical models of space plasma processes.