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Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hotter-than-the-sun dept.

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?"

3 of 594 comments (clear)

  1. How did they measure it ? by distributed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    and I RTFA.

    --
    [all generalizations are untrue except this one]
    1. Re:How did they measure it ? by nleaf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

  2. Re:The article is really confusing.... by Manchot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.