Japan says that it has created and fired the world's most powerful laser and researchers have plans to make it even stronger.
The laser developed by scientists at Osaka University created a more than 300-foot-long, two-petawatt laser beam, which is equal to 1,000 times the electricity consumed in the world, the
Daily Mail reported.
Despite its enormous power, it only uses the electricity needed to power a typical microwave for two seconds. This was possible because the researchers fired the laser for a trillionth of a second, also known as one picosecond.
Endgaget reports that a picosecond amount of time doesn't require a lot of energy to produce a massive amount of wattage.
To understand just how powerful two petawatts is,
Popular Science says that a 50,000-watt laser was used to take down a done that was a mile away.
But the Japanese researchers have plans to increase the power of the laser, which is called the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX), which some are likening to the "Death Star" laser beam in the "Star Wars" saga.
"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," said Junji Kawanaka, associate professor of electrical engineering at Osaka University.
"Two petawatts, that’s a lot," Julio Soares, senior research scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Popular Science.
When asked what such a powerful laser can be used for, Soares said, "Well, to blow things up."
A one-petawatt laser was produced by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin. According to Popular Science, a petawatt is equal to a quadrillion watts.
The International Space Station said in May that it had plans to test a laser that scientists are hoping could be
used to get rid of space junk around the Earth's orbit.
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