Australian physicists have created a water-based tractor beam that could confine oil spills, manipulate floating objects and explain beach rips.

Michael Shats, one of researcher of the study, said that wave generators help them control water flow patterns that enables object to float.

The researchers created a new technique that resembles tractor beams that can control things that are drifting on water.

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A tractor beam, earlier called an attractor beam, is fictional device that was coined by E.E Smith that has the ability to attract an object to another distance.

Hortz Punzman from the Research School of Physics and Engineering said that they also created waves that can force floating objects to move against the direction of the wave.

Researchers never have guessed this result, he said.

Punzman explained that they used a ping-pong ball in a wave tank and subjected the ball into different wave size and frequency to their desired direction.

Nicolas Francois and Hua Xia, doctors who are part of the research, said that they used advanced particle tracking tools that revealed that waves can generate currents on water surface.

Shats explained that they found that on a certain height the three-dimensional waves can generate flow patterns on the surface of the water.

He said that tractors beams can create just one pattern, the flows inwards, outwards or in vortex shaped water.

Shats also said that researchers experimented on plungers with different shapes that can generate swirling flow patterns.

Punzmann stressed that there is still no mathematical theory that can explain these phenomenon.

He believes that it's one of the great unresolved problems that scientists need to figure out, even when ordinary people can reproduce this in their bathtubs.

We are surprised that no one had described it before, he said.