Humans have created a star! Can you believe it?
Please do because sometime in the future you can reap the benefits!
Let’s start with a natural star.
The star closest to Earth is, of course, our sun.
It’s rays provide our “spaceship” with warmth and light in just the right intensity and amount so that all kinds of plants and animals and we humans can live here quite comfortably.
Warmth and light are forms energy. Do you know how the sun generates this energy?
The process is called nuclear fusion, or just fusion. It works like this:
Inside the sun, there is a gigantic amount of nuclei which are moving around all the time.
Nuclei are simply the cores of atoms (with atoms being the “building blocks” of all solid, liquid and gaseous things and they all consist of the core and a shell around it).
The colder something is, the slower the nuclei move, the hotter something is, the faster they move.
The sun is very hot (about 10 Million degrees Celsius). Therefore, the nuclei are moving around so fast that they constantly crash into each other.
And when they do, the fuse and form new chemical elements and physical particles.
This fusion process creates energy which the elements release.
That’s good for the sun. But what about the artificial star now?
For decades, scientists have tried to recreate this process in labs.
On one hand, because it allows them to conduct experiments and study the results.
On the other hand, because this is a sought-after technology for generating energy for your and my household.
The elements from which the necessary nuclei are derived, are available in abundance and there are neither radioactive waste nor greenhouse gases that you’d have to deal with.
Earlier this month, British scientists finally managed to create an artificial star by pushing extremely hot plasma into a magnetic field.
As soon as you have the plasma there and it’s hot enough (on Earth, it needs to be 100 degrees Celsius), the nuclei will start moving so fast that they crash and fuse. And boom, you have a little star.
The star in the British lab lasted for only 5 seconds. Then the magnets which created the described magnetic field became too hot and could’ve been destroyed through the heat.
This problem can be overcome by building bigger systems with better cooling.
Such a system will start operating in France in 2025.
The longer the artificial star exists, the more energy it’s going to release and the more cost-efficient it’ll become.
Right now, more energy is needed to start the fusion process than what the artificial star generates afterwards.
However, with bigger and better machines, scientists believe that they can reverse this within 10 to 50 years.
And then you might not only heat your home with fusion energy, you might also enjoy a nice bonus if you’re into investing.
As of 2022, there are more than 40 private companies spread all around the Earth in the fusion niche.
Had a coffee and a good time while reading this article? Feel free to get me a coffee too!
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