Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It's called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.
The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg
Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn't the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?
"We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments," says Jacak. "The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we're trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature."
The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg
How the hell do you contain seven trillion degrees celsius? The temperature of the freaking SUN is 5,500 degrees celsius!! What material could possibly withstand that temperature if even GOLD is going to get vaporized? I don't even think this experiment is even possible. I mean, come on! Think about it...
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