China makes its own 'Artificial Sun' three times hotter than the real Sun

Beijing: China has been working to harness clean nuclear energy for quit so long. Researchers from China's 'Hefei Institutes of Physical Sciences' announced the news on their website on Nov 14, "China's 'Artificial Sun' achieves major breakthrough.

"China's "artificial sun" has for the first time achieved a plasma central electron temperature of 100 million C, marking a key step in China's future fusion reactor experiment," said the research team.

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This 'Artificial sun’ has became the hottest nuclear fusion experiment on our planet Earth- with the plasma temperature reaching 100 million degrees Celsius.

Interestingly, it is said that our solar system’s Sun is only about 15 million degrees Celsius hot.

The comparison between the two is mind-blowing, making the man-made Sun the winner of the game.

However, 100 million degrees Celsius is said to be the minimum temperature required for self-sustaining nuclear fusion on Earth, making the task tougher for the research team but not impossible.

Researchers set up the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor in 2006 to generate energy by replicating the process used by our Sun.

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Nuclear fusion promises Humans to give them clean energy as it does not produce any radioactive waste. And the raw materials deuterium and tritium required for nuclear fusion are almost inexhaustible in the ocean making it eligible to be termed as environmental friendly.

A ‘Tokamak’ is a reactor design which resembles a donut in shape. Tokamak generates powerful magnetic forces to contain unimaginably hot plasma inside the reactor during nuclear fusion. Its walls are built to absorb the massive amounts of heat from the continuous splitting of atoms in the reactor’s core.

The researchers are still working on the fusion reactor to sustain for longer i.e. for few more minutes. The longest recorded reaction was at the 'Tore Supra Tokamak' in France (also known as WEST), for 6 minutes and 30 seconds in 2003.

Well with ground breaking records, EAST and WEST are likely to help mankind to light up a Sun at night too.

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