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Want to make a super-earth? Bring on the frikking lasers

Want to make a super-earth? Bring on the frikking lasers

A team of physicists have attempted to recreate the internal conditions of a ‘super-Earth’ planet in a lab, by shooting laser beams at iron samples. Super-Earths are a type of exoplanet. They have a higher mass than Earth, but are not as massive as Uranus and Neptune. The giants are about 15 and 17 times the mass of Earth.

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Figure 1. My first campaign as a professor! Undergraduate Junellie Gonzalez Quiles (UMD, BS ‘18) and myself assisted on a Princeton/LLNL project