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Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab─4 trillion degrees celsius─hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.
They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions—which lasted only for milliseconds.
But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed.
"That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor said. These particles make up atoms, but they are made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons.
They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider(RHIC), a particle accelerator and collider that is 3.8 km around and buried 4 metres underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times.
"RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe," Vigdor said.
In comparison, "The predicted melting temperature of protons and neutrons is 2 trillion degrees. The temperatures at the core of a typical type-2 supernova is 2 billion degrees," he said. The center of our sun is 50 million degrees, iron melts at 1,800 degrees and the average temperature of the universe is now 0.7 of a degree above absolute zero.
Vigdor's team believe they are looking at a recreation of the moment just before the quark-gluon soup condensed into hadrons─the particles of matter that make up most of our universe.
Later this year, physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland hope to smash lead ions together to create even hotter temperatures that should replicate moments even earlier in the birth of the universe. ■Reuters
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