DIY Star: How to Make a Star
You can make a star. The process is called inertial confinement fusion, and its taking crazy personal science experiments to a whole new level. If you attempt this in your garage or home, please wear protective glasses. You also might want to consider a helmet.
Recipe verbatim from the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility website:
- Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
- Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
- Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts – the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
- Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.
- Wait ten billionths of a second.
- Result: one miniature star.
In this process the capsule and its deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel will be compressed to a density 100 times that of solid lead, and heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius – hotter than the center of the sun. These conditions are just those required to initiate thermonuclear fusion, the energy source of stars.
By following our recipe, we would make a miniature star that lasts for a tiny fraction of a second. During its brief lifetime, it will produce energy the way the stars and the sun do, by nuclear fusion. Our little star will produce ten to 100 times more energy than we used to ignite it.
That ought to do it. Please don’t use your homemade star for any destructive purposes.
The Power of the Sun in the Palm of Our Hands
Filed under: Alien Intelligence, Aliens, Animal Intelligence, Discoveries, Science, Science Fiction, Technology, The Future
We could soon harness the power of a sun in a laboratory setting, ala Dr. Octopus’s mad scientist escapades in Spider Man 2. Or at least that’s what this experiment hopes to prove (report from WIRED.)
The project at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility plans to ignite a miniture star in a controlled lab environment using lasers. This tiny nuclear reactor could produce tremendous amounts of energy. For example, our sun blasts about 386 BILLION gigawatts of energy into space. A large nuclear reactor generates 1 gigawatt. Do the math. Even if we could create a star hundreds of billions times smaller than our sun, the energy output would still be massive. This could solve all of our energy problems as long as we can control the nuclear fusion and harness to power of a star. Worst case scenario = the destruction of earth if the star we build powers out of control.
This building could soon be home to a man-made baby star.