If ever in the wrong hands, who knows what havoc an evil-doer could create with this next entry? That might sound like a line from a comic book, but the Texas Petawatt laser is the highest-powered laser in the world, thus creating the brightest light on Earth.
The light bulb in my lamp nearby is 72 watts. The Texas Petawatt laser is greater than one petawatt –one hundred thousand million watts . That's 2,000 times more powerful than all of the power plants in the United States.
Todd Dimitre of the Texas High Intensity Laser Science Group leads The Petawatt project. What is the function of such a powerful and bright laser? Dimitre explains, “We will use the laser to create and study matter at some of the most extreme conditions in the universe, including gases at temperatures greater than those in the sun and solids at pressures of many billions of atmospheres. This will allow them to explore many astronomical phenomena in miniature. They will create mini-supernovas, tabletop stars and very high-density plasmas that mimic exotic stellar objects known as brown dwarfs.” Yeah, prof, we couldn't have said it any better ourselves.
The laser is brighter than the sun, but its power lasts only for a very short period of time, a 10th of a trillionth of a second in this case -- or 0.0000000000001 second.
We hate to see what their electric bill is like!
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