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Inside the target chamber at the University of Rochester’s Omega Facility, a team of researchers including Princeton University’s Thomas Duffy and June Wicks use lasers to compress iron-silicon samples to the ultrahigh pressures found in the cores of super-Earths. Credit: Photo courtesy of Laboratory for Laser Energetics

How researchers are using lasers to recreate the extreme pressures of exoplanet interiors. Using high-powered laser beams, researchers have simulated conditions inside a planet three times as large as Earth. Scientists have identified more than 2,000 of these “super-Earths,” exoplanets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, the next-largest planet in our solar system...