• Question: can you make a sun

    Asked by to Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 20 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      Yes and no. A sun or star is basically a giant plasma of hydrogen atoms fusing to make helium atoms and giving off energy as they do so. You can make a plasma. I was at the Big Bang Fair last week and they did a demonstration where they got a modified microwave, cut open a grape and put it in a microwave under a measuring cylinder and put the microwave on to create a glowing purple gloop that looked linke a mini solar system swirling round at the top of the measuring cylinder. That was pretty cool (wish I knew what they’d done to the microwave).

      You can also create hydrogen fusion although as a source of energy this has been investigated and as far as I know they haven’t developed it to actually work as an energy source – you have toput too much energy in to start with.

      What wouldn’t work would be making it big enough that, like a sun, it would hold itself together under its own gravity.

    • Photo: Kieren Bradley

      Kieren Bradley answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      I can’t but as Rowena said, you can do it by a fusion reactor, of which the only on e I know of in the UK is the Joint European Torus (JET) which is a doughnut shape machine which uses a lot of power to create a magnetic field to hold the hydrogen plasma in place and allows it to collide and create helium and a lot of power.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus a bit more information about the huge machine.

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