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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?"
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.
... I got 3.6 Billion Degree Gas just by eating at Taco Bell last week.
Bruce
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]
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.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Let's see. The experiment released more energy than it expended....
Let me think a minute.
Yes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
That's hot
They have no idea how, but they found all that thermal energy. "[T]he high temperature was achieved after the plasma's ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in."
Sounds like magic to me!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy#Power_p lant_design
Also plasma is not a gas. The article points this out, but the title gets it mixed up. It is a 4th phase of matter associated with high conductivity and separation of ionic components
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
My work involved doing quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations to extract equation of state (EOS) data for the tungsten wires used in the z-pinches. The highest temperatures I remember the simulations reaching, however, were only about 40,000 Kelvin.
I don't care what anyone says, these new pentiums just plain run too warm.
In late breaking news, it was revealed that a software bug cause this faulty reading. The correct value should have read: 150 degress.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
...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
None of you have any idea what's going on! What really happened is these scientists have stumbled upon a gateway to hell, and this abnormally high temperature eminating from it is just the beginning of what can come out! We need to stop the scientists NOW before it's too late!
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
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. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not like it's a weather report or anything! Keep it scientific!
When you light a campfire with a match, you get more energy out than you put in.
Sorry, this is not a recipe for perpetual motion. For a new energy source, maybe, but not perpetual motion.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
For the curious, here's the actual abstract from the research paper, as published in Physical Review Letters:
Ion Viscous Heating in a Magnetohydrodynamically Unstable Z Pinch at Over 2×109 Kelvin
Pulsed power driven metallic wire-array Z pinches are the most powerful and efficient laboratory x-ray sources. Furthermore, under certain conditions the soft x-ray energy radiated in a 5 ns pulse at stagnation can exceed the estimated kinetic energy of the radial implosion phase by a factor of 3 to 4. A theoretical model is developed here to explain this, allowing the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion temperature plasma through the generation of fine scale, fast-growing m=0 interchange MHD instabilities at stagnation. These saturate nonlinearly and provide associated ion viscous heating. Next the ion energy is transferred by equipartition to the electrons and thus to soft x-ray radiation. Recent time-resolved iron spectra at Sandia confirm an ion temperature Ti of over 200 keV (2×109 degrees), as predicted by theory. These are believed to be record temperatures for a magnetically confined plasma.
Also, there's a press release from Sandia National Labs.
... you finally get to see the glory of the Z Machine. Too bad this vision will be your last ...
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Bush: U.S. on Verge of Energy Breakthrough
6 35046,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5
"degrees" Kelvin...
Kelvins would be the correct term.
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
You're adding energy in the form of the high potential energy found in the compounds in wood (cellulose is a good example); meanwhile, excess energy is being continuously added in the even higher-potential of a common diatom: oxygen.
Of course, you have to add energy to liberate the atoms in the first place, that being a match and the flame off your starter fluid and kindling.
Hey, campfires are complex.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I can explain it entirely with three words.
"Flying Spaghetti Monster"
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Because the density is nowhere near high enough. Fusion capsules that are imploded in the center of these devices get to be 30-50 times compressed, whereas this plasma is not compressed in any way like this, or to anywhere near this extreme.
People are simply confusing the fusion research that is done with Z-machine with what is going on here. The increase in temperature has already been explained by a model that has been shown to fit the data, and does not involve anything in the way of fusion.
This is potentially a very, very big deal. The temperature is NOT the most important thing... that's the headline for dummies.
The important part: they're getting out more energy than they're putting in, and they don't understand why.
There is a ginormous difference in 15M degrees F and 15M Kelvin.
Both are too hot for me to grasp. Even with hot pads.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
Christ, man. He didn't say relativistic principles break down, he said they're superfluous. It's overkill for the example. You're liberating energy in the form of chemical bonds, so the loss of mass as energy is pretty much negligible in chemical reactions, 'cause the mass-energy of the reactants utterly overwhelms the amount of energy released. Mass is, for all practical purposes, conserved.
I think chemists and physicists understood combustion pretty well before Einstein came along. There was this guy, you know, Lavoisier, he had a few things to say about stuff sticking around.
But come the hell on. If you have a graduate degree in physics you know this. You're just being a jerk to save some face.
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.
I scanned the article. The article does not say that total energy observed was greater than the total input energy.
What the article says, and it's easy to be confused by this, is that the observed energy was greater than the kinetic energy of the implosion. However, one has to realize that the kinetic energy isn't the only significant source of energy in the system. There is also the energy in the magnetic field. The article goes on to elucidate a mechanism by which magnetic field energy is converted to thermal energy ions, which is then transferred to electrons to produce soft X-Rays.
Thus, the bottom line here is, unfortunately, that what happened in this experiment was that one component of the total energy input, magnetic energy, which normally is not converted into heat, was converted into heat by a new mechanism. This is what the authors meant by a new energy source. In other words:
NO FUSION.
Okay, time to move along folks, nothing to see here other than some really really really really hot plasma, which probably don't have the density to achieve sustained fusion...yet. =)
Actually, if you pull the original article from Physical Review Letters, there is not a single word about that anything does not perfectly meet theoretical expectations. Not a single word about an "unknown energy source is involved".
Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"
Indeed. I love science, and in general I have tremendous faith in most scientists and physiscists. But science has progressed to a state where we are starting to venture into areas where there are huge swaths of unknowns, in physics, genetics, and nanotechnology.
I mean, this quote sums it up for me......some unknown energy source is involved.... Wow, so basically, they did this experiment, which resulted in a breaking of one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, and resulted in a gas billions of degrees higher than expected?
GMO crops, artifical black holes, supercolliding particles ( of which sometimes we don't even know what will happen until we do it)... I mean, I am beginning to think man is not going to be obliterated through war, or disease, or a nuclear holocost, but just in an instant flash of some experiment gone wrong.
We need to be very careful, the forces we are starting to toy with are both potent and dangerous, as well as increasingly misunderstood.
I spent three summers working in a trailer less than 50 meters from this machine. It always creeped me out a little. Several times a day, the sirens and flashy lights would go off outside the building, then about a minute later, we'd hear this huge "WUMPH". Our whole trailer would shake and the monitors vibrate. Despite understanding what was going on, I couldn't help but wonder about the safety of sitting next to an array of giant capacitors which get rapidly discharged all at once.
However, I must admit it does make cool pictures. The bright lines you see on most pictures are supposedly spare charge arcing across the giant pool in which they have to keep the whole thing submerged.
You need the Ove-Glove!!
Crazy energy expirements, bizarre results? I wonder if Gordon Freeman works there...
what do you mean they don't know how they did it? I thought scientists use the so-called Scientific Method they taught us all about in school. And I thought that in this Scientific Method, you're supposed to record everything you do, so that the experiment can be reproduced by other scientists.
So you create a hypothesis and design an experiment to test it out. You expect the results to be A if it works, and B if it doesn't work. But funnily enough, your result was C. Does this suddenly cast doubt on science and the scientific method in general? No. It just means that the original hypothesis is incorrect and nature doesn't work as expected. Now you just have to scratch your head and figure out how the hell "C" happens.
Sounds to me like this story is a bunch of hogwash, now that I think of it. How would you even measure the temperature in order to come to the conclusion that it was 3.6 billion degrees? There's not a thermometer on the planet that can measure something that hot.
I find it disturbing that something is "hogwash" just because you don't understand it. Perhaps if you educated yourself a little more on the subject then you'd understand how it's done.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
Broken temperature gauge. :)
Soviet Russia moves to YOU!
2400x1586 JPEG of Z
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
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.