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What is the highest temperature scientists have ever achieved?
Recently, one of the subscribers sent me the following question:
Good day. I recently read that the temperature at the core of the Sun is 15 million degrees. I’m curious, have scientists ever been able to achieve the same temperature in a laboratory?
The simple answer is yes, they have. In fact, the maximum temperature achieved in laboratory conditions is about 4 trillion degrees Celsius (approximately 250,000 times hotter than the core of the Sun).
This temperature was briefly reached in 2005 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York State.
This temperature is significant because it was approximately the temperature shortly after the Big Bang. This collider is specifically used to model the universe in the first moments after the big explosion. Such modeling can help us understand how our universe was born and evolved, shedding light on its early stages of development.
Such a high temperature was achieved through multiple collisions of gold ions. At this temperature, ordinary matter breaks apart, forming a quark-gluon…
