China makes artificial sun BREAKTHROUGH in step towards limitless energy


However, this sun won't be launched up in the skies, instead is a experiment for nuclear fusion.

As per reports, China's Hefei Institutes of Physical Sciences is working on an earth-based sun simulator which basically is a fusion reactor.

Earlier this year, a doughnut-shaped object in a building in China blazed up to 100 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the interior of the sun.

A few days back, a team of scientists at the Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co (CASC), China, developed an artificial moon that will soon replace streetlights in the country.

The machine has been created to replicate the way in which the star at the centre of our solar system generates its colossal energy. Nuclear fusion occurs when nuclei are joined together to release energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei, East China's Anhui province, has been dubbed as artificial sun since it replicates the energy-generating process of the sun.

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One way of doing this is to inject plasma into a reactor and hold it in place with magnetic fields; tokamaks like EAST do this using the fields generated by the moving plasma itself. This differs from nuclear power plants now in operation, which produce energy - as well as radioactive byproducts - by splitting uranium atoms in a process known as fission.

The high temperatures inside a fusion reactor tear electrons away from their atoms and form a charged plasma of hydrogen ions.

"Nuclear fusion is arguably the best way for human beings to get energy". The facility is 11 meters tall, with a diameter of 8 meters, and a weight of 400 tons.

As EAST has a similar design to ITER but on a far smaller scale, it is likely to be an important testing device during the development of ITER, according to China's Institute of Plasma Physics. The scientists were able to achieve an electron temperature in the core plasma of over 100 million degrees.

In theory, fusion reactors would produce energy by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium.