Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas

starexplorer2001 writes "LiveScience is reporting how scientists at Sandia's Z laboratory have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit (2 billion kelvins). That's hotter than the interior of our sun, which is only 15 million degrees F. And they don't know how they did it. Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"

Comments

Summary is wrong yet again

[Kasracer]

According to the summary, the Sun's interior is 15 million degrees Fahrenheit. According to the article, it's 15 million degrees Kelvin which makes the Sun's interior actually 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Re:Summary is wrong yet again

[dgatwood]

Degrees Kelvin is not a unit.

Uh, as long as we're being pedantic, yes, it is. It's just an obsolete unit. It's no less a unit than rods, chains, fathoms, cubits, or furlongs per fortnight.

More specifically, degrees Kelvin was replaced by "Kelvins" by decree of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (who specify the SI measurement system) back in 1967 in the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures (1). This does not mean that it suddenly ceases to be a unit, however deprecated a unit it might be.

On a side note, they decreed in 1948 that degrees Centigrade should be replaced by Celsius degrees. The fact that I, born in 1976, still originally learned it as Centigrade should give some indication about how slowly language changes.

The real problem is that every measure of temperature that people use in their daily lives is measured in degrees. People are used to saying "degrees Celsius" or "degrees Fahrenheit". I understand the desire to have all the SI units not be prefixed by such a term, but it does serve an important purpose in making temperature fairly easily distinguished from other numbers in common language use, and thus is unlikely to fade away easily. I would not be surprised if a large percentage of non-scientists were still calling it "degrees Kelvin" fifty years from now....

1. Source: U.S. Metric Association.

The article is really confusing....

[technoextreme]

It says that the record was set for the hottest temperature ever on earth. Unfortunately, the value they list is not the highest value I can obtain for a really hot temperture. The hottest temperature I found occurs at RHIC and that is a trillion degress kelvin not fifteen million. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/heavy_ion.htm Could it be a record temperture for a certain type of reaction? Also to answer the question about is this safe. Yes it's safe. The temperatures only occur for such a small tiny tiny tiny fraction of a second that it really doesn't affect anything.

Re:The article is really confusing....

[deglr6328]

I would counter that by pointing out that a gold-gold ion collision on RHIC involves at least ~1200 particles (3 quarks per nucleon and a mass of ~200 AMU(daltons) per ion). this is to say nothing of the millions of particles that are created at the collision point and then explode outward (the kinetic energy of the fast ions is converted to mass). To speak of the 2 TeraKelvin temperature of a quark-gluon plasma of a heavy ion collision makes just as much sense as to talk about the 3 GigaKelvin temp. of a small amount of iron plasma in the Z machine.

Re:How did they measure it ?

[lobsterGun]

All things glow when they heat up, and they do so in a predictable manner.

They may have been able to measure the wavelength of the electromagnetic energy coming off of the gas.

This explains it better than I ever could.

Re:How are they holding it?

[brian0918]

The container that holds the experiment is called a holhraum, just a cylindrical metal thingy. In the middle, wires are vertically strung around in a circle (see this pic). When you pass a current through the wires, they want to move towards eachother (Ampere's law). Since the situation is symmetrical, they all move towards the center, and the intense current, motion, and collision, turn the wires into a hot plasma, that doesn't stick around for long. The whole thing is over in well under a second, and the container holding the plasma is destroyed.

Here's Sandia's write-up

[gstoddart]

Rather than reading a digest from a science news site (not that it's a bad writeup) here is the press release from Sandia themselves.

Personally, I think the picture of the Z-machine is one of the coolest looking things I've seen. =)