Recipe for a Small Star
- Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
- Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
- Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts—the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
- Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.
- Wait ten billionths of a second.
- Result: one miniature star.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility
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