The video shows people on an island watching a rocket launch posted online as China launches its artificial sun. The video features people on the beach taking pictures of an orange light visible in the distance rising into the sky. The caption shared in the video reads: “China just launched their artificial sun” The video is popular across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. BOOM discovered it depicted an actual launch by China’s Long March-7A rocket, which launched the Shiyan-12 01 and 02 satellites in orbit.
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China created a fake Sun……Something is going on….. pic.twitter.com/wvQuP07zCu
— 👑King Roy (@RoyIsThaTruth) January 10, 2022
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China's "artificial sun" set a new world record after superheating a loop of plasma to temperatures five times hotter than the sun for more than 17 minspic.twitter.com/5rd9mCPDKY
— AuxGod (@AuxGod_) January 9, 2022
A copy of the post is available here.
A copy of the post can be found here.
An archive of the blog post is available here.
An archive of the blog post is available here.
An archive of the blog post is available here.
An archive of the blog post is available here.
An archive of the blog post can be found here.
Fact Check
BOOM performed a keyword search on Google using “China artificial sun” and discovered a variety of articles about the $1 trillion Chinese nuclear reactors. A report from Xinhua said that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak Fusion reactor superheated a loop the plasma up to five times more hot than the sun’s temperatures for over 17 minutes. “We achieved an LCD temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in a test in the initial half of 2021. Now, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a great scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a blend reactor,” Gong Xianzu, an investigator at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) was quoted in Xinhua as saying. A video report by The South China Morning Post shows that the fusion reactor does not exist located in space but within the ASIPP.
According to the US fact-checkers, Politifact discovered an article posted on Chinese social media site Weibo that features the same video from a different perspective. The caption on the post reads, “Huo Jian Fa She Xian Chang, Rang Wo Men Yi Qi Jian Zheng Zhong Guo Hang Tian De Wei Da Li Liang ” (The rocket launch site, let us see the immense strength in China’s aviation industry.) We then looked up recent news reports about China rocket launches and came across numerous reports on the Long March-7A Y3 rocket launch, which launched Shiyan-12 02 and 01 satellites into orbit. China Global Television Network (CGTN) report says the Long March-7A Y3 was launched at 6.12 pm on the 23rd of December 2021, from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch site in China’s Hainan province.
BOOM was unable to locate the source for the original viral video.