Photo: NASAThe Evil Scientist’s Dream Come True: A Laser Beam Strong Enough to Blow Up the Sun
Austin Power’s Dr. Evil would be excited to learn that only a few years into the new millennium we have invented a laser beam one million times brighter than our sun!
Well, technically, it is a particle accelerator and it was built to simulate nuclear explosions and generate supercomputer data. Still, in 10 years of life, the “Z machine” has produced temperatures of up to 2 billion degrees Kelvin, which according to Popular Mechanics, is actually hotter than the inside of our sun.
The Z machine even generated enough pressure to melt a diamond! We can all be thankful this machine is safely stored at Brookhaven National Laboratory rather than some evil genius’s lair. For now, anyway! Continue reading
