Scary in some ways, especially when they have no idea why it happened


Record Set for Hottest Temperature on Earth: 3.6 Billion Degrees in Lab
By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 08 March 2006
04:39 pm ET

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.
They don't know how they did it.

The feat was accomplished in the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."

Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.

The achievement was detailed in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world. It’s designed to test materials under extreme temperatures and pressures. It works by releasing 20 million amps of electricity into a vertical array of very fine tungsten wires. The wires dissolve into a cloud of charged particles, a superheated gas called plasma.

A very strong magnetic field compresses the plasma into the thickness of a pencil lead. This causes the plasma to release energy in the form of X-rays, but the X-rays are usually only several million degrees.

Sandia researchers still aren’t sure how the machine achieved the new record. Part of it is probably due to the replacement of the tungsten steel wires with slightly thicker steel wires, which allow the plasma ions to travel faster and thus achieve higher temperatures.

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the 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, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down.

Sandia National Laboratories is located by Albuquerque New Mexico and is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

They don't know how??? Unknown energy source???
Can anyone else see a big "KABOOM" in the future here?

So they made something hotter than the sun without even knowing how it happened? That's kinda worrying...

that is officially friggin cool! ^.^

A little much if you are only trying to heat up a pop tart. I did find the producing more energy than putting in...but, doesn't that go against one of the laws...energy is neither created or destroyed...something like that? Is that a law.. or theory? Was a long time ago...school.

That's a little scary that they don't know how it happened.

Its interesting that more energy is being produced than is being put in. The fact they don't know how they did it is kinda a moot point, most of the greatest discoverys were made that way.

Yeah, the Lawof Energy Conservation. My guess is it got so hot it atomized some of the Tungsten leading in to a loss of matter in the form of energy...good ol' E=mc^2. That little equation explains why a little bit of U-234 makes a real big boom.

I know that E=mc^2 is a equation that was a theory and is now a fundemental property or whatever.... But I think that someday someone will discover something out of this world and that that equation will become obsolete.

More likely someone will simply expand upon it. If they can manage to put some quantifying factor on it (like E=mc^2 only with objects of such-and-such molecular density/weight and increasing such-and-such eponentially increases energy consumption/output...yadda, yadda, yadda) it will probably be due to a revelation of other theories/laws (like we can maniuplate molecualr density/weight of objects of certain compositions by applying mu-meson particulate radiation...yadda, yadda, yadda.)