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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.
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.
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
I can explain it entirely with three words.
"Flying Spaghetti Monster"
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
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!!
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.