Lasers are fantastic right? I mean, every kid at some point in their life wanted to get hold of one of those fantastic laser pointers. However, they were most likely told off by their parents for how dangerous they were. Those parents obviously haven’t seen this latest piece of research then from the National Ignition Facility in California. They have been experimenting with some incredibly powerful lasers indeed.
Recently, they have configured 192 high powered laser beams to fire simultaneously. These were all aimed at the same target. This was a small circle which measured no more than 2 millimetres in diameter. Now here is the real kicker, the energy that this tiny circle was blasted with measured 500 trillion watts. For information, this is 1,000 times more than the amount of electricity that the rest of the United States was using at that current time. Something tells me that the electricity company which supplies the National Ignition Facility won’t be happy about that.
This is the highest powered laser ever shot in real life, well, presuming that the death star wasn’t real at least. This is certainly going to earn itself a place in the record books.
The main goal wasn’t just to get into the record books however, this research was all in the name of science. Eventually, the scientists intend to created nuclear fusion by aiming the lasers at a compressed pellet of hydrogen. This reaction will generate energy, much more than what was blasted at it.
