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A combination of four Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) detectors'”BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR'”measured a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius, or 39 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.
The temperature was produced after a carefully controlled explosion occurred inside the 3.9-kilometer (2.4-mile) long Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Learn more about the RHIC (pronounced 'Rick') particle accelerator and collider at the BNL webpage 'The Physics of RHIC.'
The temperature produced at Brookhaven was hotter than what is produced inside the Sun, at a temperature of a mere 15 million degrees Celsius (59 million degrees Fahrenheit).
You have to go hotter than the Sun to equal what was produced at Brookhaven.
It was hotter than what is produced inside a dying star that is exploding and producing a supernova, only about 10 billion degrees Celsius (40 billion degrees Fahrenheit).
You have to go hotter still.
The temperature produced at Brookhaven is comparable to the temperature produced by the Big Bang explosion, which occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, plus or minus a few hundreds of millions of years.
Page two discusses more about the dramatic new record produced by the scientists at Brookhaven.
