Physicists Create Highest Man-Made Temperature Ever

Physicists from the Brookhaven National Laboratory have gone down in the Guinness World Records book as having created the highest man-made temperature ever recorded. The scientists were smashing gold ions together using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The smashing together of the ions created a fluid called quark-gluon plasma.

The smashing together of those gold ions simulated conditions similar to those during the creation of the universe and generated a temperature of 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. That is 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is a gigantic 2.4 mile long ring where ions are accelerated to speeds close to that of light.

The experiment being conducted was called PHENIX. The experiment saw gold ions being accelerated around the ring from both directions and crashed together in one of six experimental chambers around the accelerator. The researchers observed the very brief formation of quark-gluon plasma, which is described as and nearly frictionless fluid with a temperature of 4,000,000,000,000°C.

[via LA Times]