Video Of Rocket Launch Viral As China Launching Artificial Sun To Space
The video shows the launch of China's Long March-7A Y3 rocket and not of an artificial sun.
A video of people on a beach watching a rocket launch is being shared as China launching their own artificial sun.
BOOM found that the video actually shows the launch of China's Long March-7A Y3 rocket which put Shiyan-12 01 and 02 satellites into orbit.
The video shows people on a beach recording an orange glow in the distance ascending into the sky.
The caption being shared with the video read: "China just launched their artificial sun"
The video is viral on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
An archive of the post can be accessed here.
Fact Check
BOOM did a key word search on Google with "China artificial sun" and found many articles on $1 trillion Chinese fusion reactor.
A report on Xinhua stated that Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak fusion reactor superheated a loop of plasma to temperatures five times hotter than the sun for more than 17 minutes.
"We achieved a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021. This time, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a fusion reactor," Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
A video report from the South China Morning Post show that the fusion reactor is not in space but rather at the ASIPP.
The US fact-checkers Politifact found a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo which shows a similar video taken from a different vantage point.
The post is captioned, "火箭发射现场，让我们一起见证中国航天的伟大力量" (The rocket launch site, let us witness the great power of China's aerospace)
We then searched for recent reports on China launching rockets and found multiple reports of the launch of Long March-7A Y3 rocket which put Shiyan-12 01 and 02 satellites into orbit.
A report by China Global Television Network (CGTN) states that Long March-7A Y3 was launched at 6.12 pm on December 23, 2021 from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch site in China's Hainan province.
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