Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday
on Twitter Scientists are one step closer to attaining the
ultimate goal: producing temperatures high enough to sustain
fusion, the reaction that powers our Sun and the possible future
for global energy production. Researchers at the Rutherford
Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK, have attained
temperatures higher than the surface of the Sun, 10 million
Kelvin (or Celsius), by using a powerful one petawatt laser
called Vulcan. This experiment goes beyond the quest for fusion
power; generating these high temperatures recreates the
conditions of cosmological events such as supernova explosions,
and astronomical bodies like white dwarfs and neutron star
atmospheres… This is some awesome research. An international
collaboration of researchers from the UK, Europe, Japan and the
US have succeeded in harnessing an equivalent of 100 times the
world energy production into a tiny spot, measuring a fraction
of the width of a human hair. That’s a whoppin