Scientists create hottest temperature since Big Bang - 250,000 times more scorching than our Sun



Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever seen on earth - an astonishing four trillion degrees Celsius.

The record breaking temperature is 250,000 times warmer than the centre of the sun and was last seen in the universe a split second after the Big Bang.

The ultra hot explosions, which lasted for less than a billionth of a second, were created in a giant atom smasher at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Simulation of a collision between two gold ions

The experiment is shedding new light on how the universe was created in a massive explosion between 13 and 14 billion years ago.

At temperatures of four trillion C, ordinary matter breaks down into the kind of sub-atomic soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.

Dr Steven Vigdor, who led the experiment, said: ‘That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons.’

The temperature was generated by smashing together gold ions - or charged atoms of gold - at close to the speed of light in the laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

The RHIC is a 2.4 mile long doughnut shaped device buried 12 feet underground in Upton, New York.

Scientists created a temperature 250,000 times more scorching than the Sun

Scientists measured the temperature of the ultra hot matter by looking at the colour of light emitted from it - similar to the way you can tell that an iron rod is hot by looking at its glow.

The U.S. researchers will spend years studying the results of the explosions in search of tiny irregularities that explain why matter clumped together out of the primeval hot soup that appeared in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

‘RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe,’ Dr Vigdor said.

At temperatures of two million C or higher, the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom melt - turning into a liquid made up of smaller particles called quarks and gluons.

This substance filled the universe a few microseconds after it came into existence before it cooled and condensed into the atoms that make up stars, planets and cosmic dust.

The large hadron collider in its tunnel at CERN (European particle physics laboratory) near Geneva, Switzerland, where scientists expect to create even hotter temperatures later this year

Particle physicists used to think that the primeval quark-gluon plasma would exist as a gas. But the new study shows it behaves like a liquid.

Later this year, physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland hope to smash lead ions together to create even hotter temperatures that should replicate moments even earlier in the birth of the universe.

The core of a typical supernova - or exploding star - is around two billion degrees, while the centre of our sun is 50 million degrees.