South Korea has set up a new world record by lighting up an artificial sun at over 100 million degrees for a record 20 seconds. Reports say that a team of South Korean physicists used an artificial sun- a superconducting fusion device called KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) for the experiment and the scientists obtained a plasma from hydrogen- composed of hot ions that exceeded the 100 million degrees temperature.
The researchers then established a world record by turning this national artificial sun nuclear fusion reactor on by maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. The Research Centre KSTAR at the Korean Institute of Fusion Energy is a joint investigation with Seoul National University and Columbia University of the United States. This fusion surpassed the previous plasma operation in 2018 when KSTAR had reached a temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time but managed to keep it running for around 1.5 seconds only. The goal of the Institute is to achieve fusion ignition for 300 seconds by the year 2030.
This is not the first time a country has tried to light up an ‘artificial sun’ but none of them managed to maintain the operation for longer than 10 seconds.
