They create a solar storm in the laboratory.

I ask you for a little imagination, imagine a barrel or something similar, but the size of an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) that stores enough energy within itself to simulate a solar storm, basically that is what is happening inside a laboratory in the United States, the new machine named FLARE was built in the Princeton plasma physics laboratory and promises something that until recently was impossible to recreate here on Earth the same violent magnetic phenomena that occur in space and that threaten our lives. satellites, GPS, even the electrical grid of entire countries.

On the outside the Flare simply looks like a large metal cylinder just over 3 meters long and almost 3 meters in diameter, but inside it concentrates more than 6 million holes of energy, to give you an idea it is enough energy to power 1000 houses for 5 seconds. It may seem like little but when this force is concentrated in fractions of a second within a controlled magnetic field, the result is a true miniature of a solar storm.

The goal is to study a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, an event that occurs in space when magnetic field lines break and then reconnect, releasing absurd amounts of energy. Before FLARE, scientists depended on two fairly limited ways to study that phenomenon, simulations on supercomputers that never manage to represent all the real complexity of the phenomenon and space probes that can only measure small individual points in space.

Now within this 10-ton barrel, researchers can provoke and observe magnetic reconnection in real time, quantifying the energy transfer by measuring the speed of plasma heating and above all controlling each variable of the process, the safety structure is reinforced and the tests are carried out with continuous monitoring to avoid any risk of catastrophic failure.

This is important because magnetic reconnection is not only a distant cosmic event, it is responsible for solar storms that can take down GPS systems, paralyze entire electrical networks and even affect aircraft communications. In addition, the same phenomenon occurs within nuclear fusion reactors, those that promise to be the clean energy source of the future.

Understanding how reconnection works and especially how to control it may be the key to protecting our planet and making the long-dreamed-of fusion energy possible. Scientists around the world are already sending proposals to use FLARE in their own experiments, seeking answers that until now only existed in theory.

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