If you thought the sun was hot, wait until you hear what the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York was able to cook up.
The RHIC is a 2.4 mile underground track where particles are free to race around and smash into each other. During the experiment, in which the new Guinness World Record for highest man-made temperature ever recorded was set, gold nuclei were set loose to race around the RHIC at near light speeds.
When these gold nuclei smash together at these speeds, the resulting energy disintegrates the particles into a primordial soup of quarks and gluons, the same plasma matter that existed just after the Big Bang.
When the scientists measured the temperature of this plasma they had created, they found it had reached a peak temperature of 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit or 4 trillion degrees Celsius. For reference, that's about 250,000 times hotter than our Sun's core, which keeps us heated from 150 million kilometers away.
"There are many cool things about this ultra-hot matter," Brookhaven physicist Steven Vigdor said in a statement. He added that while they weren't totally shocked by the temperature achieved in the test, "we did not at all anticipate the nearly perfect liquid behavior."
What's interesting is that the liquid plasma is very similar in composition to the resulting liquid created from tests at the opposite end of the spectrum; studying atoms subjected to near absolute zero (-459.67degrees Fahrenheit, -273.15 degrees Celsius) temperatures.
"Other physicists have now observed quite similar liquid behavior in trapped atom samples at temperatures near absolute zero, ten million trillion times colder than the quark-gluon plasma we create at RHIC," Vigdor said.
Yet the incredible record may not last long. Another atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, may be in a position to trump the recent record with their experiment, dubbed ALICE. Researchers from that project have yet to publish an official temperature, though it's believed it could generate temperatures as much as 30% hotter than the RHIC (a lukewarm temperature of about 9.3 trillion degrees).
