Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
HEFEI, CHINA — China is creating an artificial star that burns at temperatures eight times hotter than our sun by replicating its energy-generating, hydrogen fusion process on Earth, according to Science Alert.
The sun’s heat ensures hydrogen nuclei move at high speeds and its mass and gravity limit the space available, inducing collisions which generate massive amounts of energy, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Hefei, China, works by recreating these conditions, using magnetic coils to hold superheated streams of hydrogen plasma in place, according to Science Alert.
One Zero explains that once the hydrogen is floating inside the magnetized chamber, it’s showered with an electromagnetic current that strips the atoms from their electrons, forms a ‘plasma,’ and then heats that plasma up.
As China’s ‘star’ can’t compress the resulting plasma to the same extent as the sun, the particles must be heated more to increase the chances of collisions. In May it reached a record plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds.
HEFEI, CHINA — China is creating an artificial star that burns at temperatures eight times hotter than our sun by replicating its energy-generating, hydrogen fusion process on Earth, according to Science Alert.
The sun’s heat ensures hydrogen nuclei move at high speeds and its mass and gravity limit the space available, inducing collisions which generate massive amounts of energy, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Hefei, China, works by recreating these conditions, using magnetic coils to hold superheated streams of hydrogen plasma in place, according to Science Alert.
One Zero explains that once the hydrogen is floating inside the magnetized chamber, it’s showered with an electromagnetic current that strips the atoms from their electrons, forms a ‘plasma,’ and then heats that plasma up.
As China’s ‘star’ can’t compress the resulting plasma to the same extent as the sun, the particles must be heated more to increase the chances of collisions. In May it reached a record plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds.
