Japan Has Just Fired The World’s Most Powerful Laser

Researchers at Osaka University in Japan claim to have fired the world’s most powerful laser, prompting comparisons to the planet-destroying Death Star laser in Star Wars.

While the powerful laser beam only lasted for a trillionth of a second, it’s power was measured as 2 petawatts or 2 quadrillion watts.

To put that into context, Popular Science explains that in 2013, a drone was shot down from 2km away using a laser with just 50kilowatts (50,000 watts) of power. Until now, the most powerful laser was a 1-petawatt device at the University of Austin in Texas.

The device that created the ‘Death Star’-like beam - the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) - is just over 90m long and takes up an entire room, making it unlikely that we’ll see it mounted on a vehicle or other mobile structure any time soon.

Despite the huge amount of power created by the laser, researchers claim that it operates on a relatively tiny amount of energy.

The research team is now working on increase the output of the laser even further.

(Image credit: Lucasfilm/Disney, University of Osaka)