Rocking with RHIC

Pete (big-pete) writes "Scienceblog carries a copy of an article which describes some unexpected results found when Physicists started slamming gold atoms together at high speeds. The resulting temperature was tens of thousands of times hotter than the cores of the hottest stars, but the resulting stream of particles did not behave as predicted. The original article is also available from the University of Rochester's news site here."

Comments

Very confused article.

[Peter T Ermit]

For example, the researchers didn't "...[collide] the circular gold atoms slightly off-center" in order "to simplify their observations." The atoms just collide off center most of the time naturally.

A bit denser, but much more accurate story about RHIC is here.