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

"Some unknown energy source is involved"

[Farrside]

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?

How did they measure it ?

[distributed]

and I RTFA.

Re:How did they measure it ?

[nleaf]

The way that the temperatures of things like plasmas are measured is to measure the radiation emitted by them as they cool. The way a spectrometer works is by measuring the properties of radiation, wavelength for instance, and use whatever various physical laws to work out the temperature of the plasma based on that measurement. The spectrometer is never really in the plasma like a thermometer in water.

As far as the submitter's comments about whether we want such a hot thing on earth, it may be high temperature, but most experimental plasmas are extremely low density. Even if the plasma somehow ruptured its container and shot out around the lab, you'd never notice a change in temperature--especially since the plasma would only be around for something on the order of nanoseconds (going from memory here, might be less than that).

Re:The article is really confusing....

[Manchot]

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.

Re:Do we want this?

[Perdo]

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.

3rd life for the machine

[jbeaupre]

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.