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Scientists create temperature of 7.2 trillion degrees, hottest since Big Bang
by Ishita Sood - February 16, 2010 - comments
The image shows the collision of two 30-billion electron-volt gold beams in the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have created temperatures of 7.2 trillion degrees, hottest since the Big Bang. The temperature is roughly 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior, which is about 50 million degrees.
The results come from a 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Department of Energy in Brookhaven National Laboratory.
“The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was designed to re-create conditions in the infant universe. These (collision) temperatures are hot enough to melt protons.
“The predicted melting temperature of protons and neutrons is 2 trillion degrees. The temperature at the core of a typical type-2 supernova is 2 billion degrees” said Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor at the American Physical Society in Washington.
The results were also discussed in a pair of papers submitted to Physical Review Letters.
Thousand collisions analyzed in a second
Scientists have been trying to hurl the gold atoms together since the year 2000. After Monday’s news, scientists believe the results have given them insight into those moments which the universe had 13.7 billion years ago.
The team also discovered signs of “symmetry-breaking” behavior in the collision bubbles which meant that charged particles immersed in a powerful magnetic field moved in different directions. Also, when the beams crossed, tiny bits of gold smashed into each other and exploded.
“We all like symmetry, but we really owe our existence to imperfection. The goal here is to create a device that can operate not only on the current of an electric charge but also on the current of spin,” said Brookhaven theorist Dmitri Kharzeev.
"We analyzed about a thousand collisions per second, about a billion in total,” said Barbara Jacak of Stony Brook University in New York.
New results are “interesting and surprising”
Frank Wilczek, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, called the new results “interesting and surprising.” He said an understanding would help know the behavior of quarks in unusual circumstances.
“It is comparable, I suppose, to understanding better how galaxies form, or astrophysical black holes,” he said.
Vigdor agreed with Wilczek’s theory and said, “It was a very big surprise.”
“It is new and important evidence showing that an exotic form of matter, last seen in the Big Bang, has been formed,” said physicist Thomas Cohen of the University of Maryland who was not part of the experiment.