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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?"
Bwah? That's the most interesting part, to me. I mean, they MUST have had that sucker plugged into a surge protector. From where did the energy appear?
and I RTFA.
[all generalizations are untrue except this one]
I'd be interested to know what kind of container they used to hold the gas.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Who knew that such a profound quantum mechanical truth was concealed in this simple nursery rhyme? I bet in half the universes, the pigs were captured in the market and butchered for sausage, and it's only in the others where they return home safely.
And the brethren went away edified.
Well, in particle accelerators like the RHIC, temperature doesn't really have a lot of meaning. Temperature is a statistical quantity, and depends on the presence of many particles to be adequately defined. In colliders, only a couple particles are present, which happen to be accelerated to high velocities (and therefore high "temperatures"). However, the article seems to imply that many particles were involved in the experiment.
It also sounds like they don't think it's because of fusion. If the ions involved are Fe ions, then you wouldn't expect to get any energy from fusion from them.
Maybe the energy is coming from strong force interactions of some sort. It sounds like the temperatures were high enough that maybe there was some sort of quark-gluon plasma thing going on.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
...exist to protect humankind from destruction. Experiments where output >> input with no explanation have an amazing potential to result in new Arizona beachfront property and still no explanation. I for one hope the next step into this effect is not too successful.
The laws of the universe have finally come out of hiding and revealed to us that energy is an illusion and the abundance thereof is merely the lack of any continents at rest.
Just out of curiosity, what does that temperature imply about the velocity of the atoms in order to have that kind of average KE? is it fast enough to have relativistic significance?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
Gee, that's not big or anything. Makes sense to put that as an afterthought 4 paragraphs down...
All's true that is mistrusted
Is it because of its high melting point? What would happen if they used wires made of a denser metal, such as osmium or gold or even uranium?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
They should try lithium wires instead of iron. The lower atomic weight may allow a fusion reaction to start and convert the Li into heavier elements until significant amounts of Fe are produced by the reaction. After that, the whole thing blows up ... or something like that.
Nice, You have successfully unified Descarte's "I think therefore I am" with Schrodinger's cat, and you are immortal in this universe because you are always observing and can not take the dead cat path.
Only one problem: Your universe only exists as long as you do.
Damned if you do.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The "Scientific Method" is not about recording everything -- although I'm sure that helps. The scientific method is: Observe, Hypothesize, Predict and Verify. From reading the article, it's clear that they've done or attempted all those things and hence are following the method. As for measuring temperature (even at 3.6 E9 K) you'd have to have one long thermometer, or you could measure the spectrum of radiation emitted by the reaction and determine the temperature using Planck's law of blackbody radiation. Or something to that effect ...
The paper that proposes a model to explain the results says that the final plasma was pinched down to 3.6mm. If a glass tube containing fusable material (D+T ?) were at the center of the hohlraum, it would also get crushed from the inrushing plasma.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
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).
The thousands (not millions) of particles in RHIC do not constitute a plasma. They are individual particles. Properly, the record is for temperature of a plasma. I do not know the formal definition (if there IS one) of the cutoff point between many discrete particles and a proper plasma, and there may be a grey area between the two categories, but the RHIC collision results and the Z machine results are well on either side of such a threshold.
Growing up in Albuquerque, I got a chance to tour the machine they are using. Almost 20 years ago! One of the coolest aspects, besides the famous light show, is that they built the original machine for something like $10 mil and keep finding new uses for it. It's just a giant capacitor, so scientists keep thinking of new uses. I forget the orginal use. Light ion fusion reactor or something. Then it was converted to a heavy ion reactor. Now the Z-pinch configuration. It might have had a few incarnations in between. But it's great to see such a useful tool being resused for great science and that doesn't cost a billion dollars.
Oh, and Trekkies: the control room is, or was, has connections to the bridge of the Enterprise, including a places for Kirk et al with nameplates.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It might seem unrelated, but we haven't found any sign of intelligent life signals from our SETI efforts. There are many technical reason why that might (or even should) be the case, but it has lately ocurred to me that one reason we don't hear from them might be because about the time they become advanced enough to start generating intelligent signals via physical phenomenon like electromagnetic radiation, they then stumble upon "something" that takes them out. These days, we imagine that to be muclear weapons, which could certainly evaporate an advanced civilization if they got out of hand. But imagine for a moment that warfare is unique to primates (we do hope) and imagine further that civilizations discover nuclear weapons and, like the Chinese apparently did with blackpowder, use them safely for entertainment. What might happen then is a bit more troubling: they go on to play with nuclear processes until the faithful day when they discover something -- a reaction of some kind or a new form of matter -- that simply cannot be contained. And in a flash it devours them. If it is easy to stumble upon, and gives no warning regarding what will happen next, then it becomes a technological trap that no advancing civilization can get past.
I heard it said once that if we ever discover a signal from deep space that suggests an extraterrestrial origin, it will be utterly profound and life altering to be certain, but that NOT finding a signal is equally as profound. I'd go on to suggest that NOT finding a signal is a signal in itself, and a warning: There is something lurking in the actions of the physical universe, buried in it's forms and processes, that will when you hit it just right take you out. And that you run into it sometime shortly after you discover electricity.
Not to bring anybody down, you know.
Have a nice eternity,
theCat
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us