China has unveiled an extremely powerful “hypergravity machine” that can generate forces almost two thousand times stronger than Earth’s regular gravity.
The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was constructed at China’s Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) at Zheijang University in Eastern China, and allows researchers to study how extreme forces affect various materials, plants, cells, or other structures, as the South China Morning Post reports.
It can effectively compress space and time, allowing researchers to recreate the conditions during catastrophic events, from dam failures to earthquakes. For instance, it can analyze the structural stability of an almost 1,000-feet-tall dam by spinning a ten-foot model at 100 Gs, meaning 100 times the Earth’s regular gravity.
It could also be used to study the resonance frequencies of high-speed rail tracks, or how pollutants seep into soil over thousands of years.
