Record Set for Hottest Temperature on Earth: 3.6 Billion Degrees in Lab

This one really caught the Chief’s eye, since he teaches about the sun’s hottest core temperature is in the range of 15 million K, temperatures in the BILLIONS is truly mind-blowing!

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit….They don’t know how they did it.

Yet!

The feat was accomplished in the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories.

Click on image to enlarge
An electrical storm lights up the surface of the Z machine, an accelerator built to simulate what happens during a nuclear explosion. The electrical discharges result from powerful electric fields that the experiment produces.

“At first, we were disbelieving,” said project leader Chris Deeney. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result.” Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.

There’s more detail in the article on how this device does it’s little thing, but the REALLY interesting bit is this:

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

Hello? “…releasing more energy than was originally put in…” Uh, that is the whole point of the research at achieving controlled fusion. Maybe this is a new pathway towards that sort of energy supply. Time will tell, but IMHO these results could be EXTREMELY significant in a number of scientific and technical areas.