The Germans have just created something absolutely extraordinary, and it could result in a major breakthrough in the world of energy. They’re calling it the world’s largest artificial sun, and it was lit in Julich, about 19 miles to the west of the German city of Cologe.

The Synlight has 149 film project spotlights and produces 10,000 times the intensity of natural sunlight that can be found here on Earth. The lamps concentrate their light on one spot, which heats up to 3,500 degrees Celsius, which is two or three times what you would find in a super-heated furnace.

“If you went in the room when it was switched on, you’d burn directly,” Professor Bernard Hoffschmidt, a research director at the German Aerospace Center, where the experiment is housed in a protective radiation chamber, said in a report by The Guardian.

Hopefully, the artificial light source could result in a way to concentrate sunlight in order to power a reaction that would produce hydrogen fuel, which would be a major energy breakthrough. Solar power stations currently work by using mirrors to focus sunlight on water, producing steam to turn turbines, but this would go a step beyond that.

“Synlight fills a gap in the qualification of solar-thermal components and processes,” explains Kai Wieghardt, who played a key role in the development and construction of the facility. “The scale of the new artificial Sun is between laboratory systems like DLR’s high-performance lamps in Cologne and the large-scale technical facilities such as the solar tower here in Jülich.”