The hottest place in our solar system is not the Sun, as you might think, but a machine near a south Oxfordshire village called Culham. Housed inside a vast hangar, it’s a nuclear fusion experiment called JET, or Joint European Torus. When operating, temperatures here can reach 150 million degrees Celsius – ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. On December 21st 2021, JET set a new record by producing 59 megajoules of sustained energy through a process known as nuclear fusion.
Image: The JET device has been operating at Culham since 1983. - https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk
