By Eddie Wrenn
This, but an awful lot warmer: The temperatures created by the lab are 250,000 times hotter than the sun
Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever seen on earth - an astonishing four trillion degrees Celsius.
And in case you doubt it - the searing heats have been verified by the Guinness Book of Records, who confirmed the record-breaking temperature, which 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.
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: There are many cool things about this ultra-hot matter. We did not at all anticipate the nearly perfect liquid behavior.'
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.
An aerial view of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, America, where physicists recreated the Big Bang-like temperatures. The six rectangles show where the protons collide to create such heat
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.
A Brookhaven National Laboratory employee works on the 68,000-gallon pool where spent fuel rods from the plant's reactor are stored until they can be shipped for reprocessing
‘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.
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.
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Man caused the big bang didn't he?
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im more worried about what these physicists are doing than nuclear war. are these people being checked? or are they just doing what they like in the name of science....how far will they go before its too late? - Stephen Nix, Dublin, Ireland, 27/6/2012 22:44==========Go back to reading your bible idiot.
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They are determined to make 21st December 2012 happen.
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This is like small children sticking their fingers in electric sockets to see what will happen. I do hope they don't hurt themselves and all of us. Foolish behaviour.
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Hopefully we will be able to split the universe like we did that atom and cause a cataclysmic event that will cause a violent upheaval which causes great destruction and will bring about a fundamental change in how we view our reality forever. Well done science.
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and this is all in aid of? - Sal, London UK., 27/6/2012 19:33 - If we didn't have science your computer and you would not be asking that question of us.
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Science at it's best, eat it up creationists.
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These scientists are brilliant, one day they will split the fabric of time and space and we can see what is on the other side.
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How do they know the temperature at centre of the sun, stick a thermometer in it?
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This is ridiculous. If they created temperatures that created the big bang how come a new universe wasn't created out of what they did? Supernovas heat up to 200 billion degrees so how come we don't see the big bang to create new universes all the time?
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