Scientists create hottest temperature in universe

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): A team of scientists has created the hottest temperature matter ever measured in the universe - 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.

The team used Brookhaven's giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, to ram charged gold particles into each other billions of times, creating a "quark-gluon plasma" with a temperature hotter than anything known in the universe, even supernova explosions.

The experiment is recreating the conditions of the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.

University of Colorado (CU) Boulder physics department Professors Jamie Nagle and Edward Kinney are collaborators on the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX, one of four large detectors that helps physicists analyze the particle collisions using RHIC.

PHENIX, which weighs 4,000 tons and has a dozen detector subsystems, sports three large steel magnets that produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths.

RHIC is the only machine in the world capable of colliding so called "heavy ions" - atoms that have had their outer cloud of electrons stripped away.

The research team used gold, one of the heaviest elements, for the experiment.

The gold atoms were sent flying in opposite directions in RHIC, a 2.4-mile underground loop located in Upton, New York.

The collisions melted protons and neutrons and liberated subatomic particles known as quarks and gluons.

"It is very exciting that scientists at the University of Colorado are world leaders in laboratory studies of both the coldest atomic matter and now the hottest nuclear matter in the universe," said Nagle, deputy spokesperson for the 500-person PHENIX team.

The new experiments with RHIC produced a temperature 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior.

The collisions created miniscule bubbles heated to temperatures 40 times hotter than the interior of supernova.

By studying the "soup" of subatomic particles created by the RHIC, researchers hope to gain insight into what occurred in the first microseconds after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago, said Kinney. (ANI)