A video has been doing the rounds on social media websites with reports of China launching its very own “artificial sun.” The video comes shortly after it was reported that the country was able to successfully generate temperatures 5x hotter than the Sun, at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion facility.
Several videos across different social media websites show the launch of a ball of plasma into the sky. The amateur footage recorded via smartphones shows crowds observing and filming the launch.
China just launched their artificial sun
What in the dragon ball z is going on… pic.twitter.com/O3LBoPV8IC
— WhaleWire (@WhaleWire) January 10, 2022
What Really Happened
This video is completely fake as it has nothing to do with China’s artificial sun. It is simply an older video of a rocket launch in China manipulated to create a viral video online.
The circulating video can be traced back to September 2021, where ‘Proven Facts’ published a video on YouTube. The caption stated:
China has reached an unprecedented nuclear achievement, thanks to the “artificial sun” nuclear reactor that it has developed and is used around the world. A video spread showing the moment of launching the so-called artificial sun, amid the astonishment of those present, which turned night into day.
Accompanying keywords such as “SpaceX launch today channel” and “space x rocket launch today,” highlight videos from September 2021 and January 2022 depicting the launch of China’s ‘artificial sun.’
On the other hand, past videos of SpaceX and other nighttime launches show a very similar ‘fireball’ rising into the sky, including videos of the Falcon 9 rocket launched in 2015 and the SiriusXM satellite, filmed in June 2021.
Videos of the ‘artificial sun’ also feature the tell-tale exhaust trail of the rockets as they shoot up into the sky. The large white cloud of exhaust gas in the surfaced video matches the white cloud left by the launch of China’s Shiyan-12-01 and Shiyan-12-02 satellites onboard the Chang Zheng 7A rocket in December 2021.
The misleading video is simply the manipulation of existing footage and genuine reports from China over the past few years on achieving record-breaking temperatures in its nuclear fusion reactors.
China’s Fusion Reactor
In the latest report, on 30th December 2021, a team of Chinese researchers claimed to have achieved plasma temperatures of 120 million degrees Fahrenheit or 70 million degrees Celsius, holding it for 1,056 seconds.
The China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) stated that the HL-2M Tokamak ‘artificial sun’ uses a “powerful magnetic field to fuse hot plasma and can reach temperatures of over 150 million degrees Celsius.”
Dubbed as a huge advancement of China’s nuclear research, the reactor makes use of hydrogen and deuterium gases as fuel.
Located in the Chengdu region in South Western Sichuan province, the reactor is expected to provide clean energy through controlled nuclear fusion.
Reported to be the country’s largest in scale and highest in parameters, the fusion reactor aims to produce electric power from the energy released during the nuclear fusion reaction. The Sun and other stars also generate their energy via nuclear fusion, releasing very large amounts of energy and heat. This is why China is calling it the “artificial sun”.
okay