Chinese Scientists Create Hypergravity Machine That’s 100 Times Stronger than Earth’s Gravity
50 feet below the campus of Zhejiang University in Eastern China, scientists and engineers are probably having the same feeling your mother has when someone delivers a new washing machine to your house. They are welcoming the chief, a.k.a. CHIEF1900. In the same way as a new washing machine brings the promise of new and more stunning features, this gigantic machine sitting inside the university laboratory promises a kind of future-predicting ability that cannot be mimicked even by nature. With its long metal-laced radial arms, two slinging baskets, and centrifuge that’s the cosmic version of a salad spinner, CHIEF1900 can compress space and time to create gravity so high it would make Earth feel shy. A typical washing machine generates a gravitational force of 2 g. This hypergravity machine can generate up to 1,900 g, as the South China Morning Post (SCMP) described in a recent report.
Installed on December 22, 2025, CHIEF1900 has enabled China’s scientists to break their own record in hypergravity experiments. Designed by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Group, the newest machine surpasses its older cousin, named CHIEF1300, which was launched only in September last year. With an enhanced capacity for gravity simulation, this latest mechanical chief can recreate catastrophic events like dam failures or earthquakes, all inside a lab.
The list of applications would make the longest scroll run short of space. How clocks function, how pollutants migrate through soil, how high-speed rail tracks collaborate with the ground; CHIEF1900 might as well solve some of these exciting mysteries. Not to mention that the construction of this machine did come with its own matrix of challenges. A complex rococo of civil engineering, automation, thermodynamics, and environmental science was spun to reach the desired objective. Heat proved to be one of the greatest hurdles.
Since centrifuge tends to threaten the system with their high rotational speed and the enormous heat generated through it, engineers developed a vacuum-based temperature control system to counter the problem. The system includes the world’s largest flange diameter, which combines vacuum pumping, glacier coolant and forced-air ventilation, a combination that allows safe dissipation of heat.
Chen Yunmin, CHIEF’s chief scientist and a researcher from the university, shared with the Chinese media outlet that the aim was to create “experimental environments that span milliseconds to tens of thousands of years and atomic to kilometre scales” under a spectrum of pressure conditions ranging from normal to extreme. With this, the team has made it accessible to witness the mechanisms of various phenomena and processes occurring naturally, but invisibly, on our planet. Earthquakes, for example. By simulating these processes inside the lab, they may be able to predict various catastrophic events and if possible, reverse them. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration even to say that this hulking chief is the new mechanical god that can help humans save the Earth one spin at a time.
More on Green Matters
NASA Discovers Puzzling Solo Black Hole That Is 50 Million Times the Mass of the Sun
Dark Energy Study Reveals the Universe’s Expansion Is Slowing Down— Could Lead To ‘Big Crunch’
Nature Is Slowly Crumbling the Roads in This National Park in Washington — Officials Are Helpless