Big Red Ball: A Tiny Version of the Sun Built in Wisconsin
via MOTHERBOARD
The Sun, a giant nuclear fusion reactor that our planet orbits, is the most powerful entity in the solar system and essential to life on Earth. Despite this, our star is one of the least understood objects in our cosmic neighborhood.
Enter the Big Red Ball (BRB), a “mini-Sun” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison built to simulate solar dynamics in a laboratory setting.
In a study published on Monday in Nature Physics, scientists demonstrated that the newly-operational BRB can mimic some of the Sun’s most complex properties.