This Is Amazing Stuff

Record set for hottest temperature on Earth
Scientists produce gas more than 100 times hotter than the sun

By Ker Than
MSNBC
Updated: 7:59 p.m. ET March 8, 2006

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.

The really scary thing is that these guys don't even know why this occurred. Oh well, most great discoveries in science happen by accident. This holds great promise for advancing nuclear fusion reactors. One of the constraining factors has always been achieving the extreme temperatures necessary to sustain a reaction. If we ever manage to reign in the power of a fusion reactor then we will have solved the majority of our energy problems.

Folks this is really big.

Scandia labs, "You go guys!"

Full Story: Fusion in the Offing?

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