ITV News Science Editor Martin Stew was given a behind-the-scenes access to a facility at Imperial College London looking to see how stars are made.
Researchers have developed a simulator so powerful it can briefly unleash energy equivalent to the entire US national grid, as ITV News Health and Science Correspondent Martin Stew reports
"What we're doing is a taking a relatively modest amount of electricity - about the amount you use to boil a kettle - and focusing it into a point of time that it is the same amount of power as produced by the whole of the US national grid," Prof Jerry Chittinden, Plasma Physics, Imperial College London told ITV News.
Scientists are using the Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments to conduct their research.Using super slow motion cameras and lasers, scientists are able to see how plasma moves and interacts.In the case of a star the scale isn't one to 10, like a plane, but one to a trillion trillion.
"The fact that you can reproduce this behavior, and it's so many hundreds of orders of magnitude different - but you can still do it - is really exciting," PhD researcher Katherine Marrow said."Space weather is a fairly big problem. If you have a really big solar flare, for example, then that can wipe out communications on earth.The actual machine has been used for years in the pursuit of nuclear fusion - the energy source which powers the sun.
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