South Korea’s ‘artificial sun’ achieves 100 million degrees for 20 seconds, breaks world record

Reaching an ion temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, South Korea’s magnetic fusion device, the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) has set a new world record for fusion. The magnitude of the experiment can be understood from the fact that the Sun burns at 15 million degrees Celsius. By comparison, the KSTAR was able to achieve a temperature of over 6.6 times more than that of Sun’s.

The KSTAR has often been referred to as South Korea’s “artificial sun”. It achieved the same temperature in 2018 too, but only for one and a half seconds. In 2019, it reached that temperature for eight seconds.