Question: How will you manage to get a star in to a box and if you do, what will you use its heat source for?

Tom Nicholas answered on 13 Jun 2017:

When I say “put a star in a box”, I don’t literally mean take a star from the sky and put it into a box. What I mean is that we try to create something that is like a mini-star from things we already have on Earth, and do that inside a special machine which can keep it hot.

Stars are made of a hot gas called Hydrogen, which if you get it hot enough, will turn into a different gas, Helium. This process is called “Nuclear Fusion”, and will release lots of heat when it happens. If we heat the Hydrogen up enough, and hold it in well enough, then lots of Nuclear Fusion will happen and make even more heat. The idea is to then use this heat source to make lots of electricity, and use that to power our homes and lights and microwaves and ovens and cars and everything! This would be good because there is lots of Hydrogen around (we can get the Hydrogen we need from water in the sea!), and because Nuclear Fusion doesn’t create Greenhouse Gases and cause Global Warming like burning coal or oil does.

To make this happen we take some Hydrogen gas, blast it with powerful microwaves and particles from particles accelerators to heat it up, then hold it still using powerful magnets. This way we can make it as hot as the Sun without letting it touch the walls of our machine, because it is held in mid-air by the magnets.

This is really hard to do, and far we haven’t made it work as well as we need to, but we are hoping that by the time that you are having children then we can use Nuclear Fusion to make as much energy as we need for everyone!