The highest temperature ever reached under controlled conditions is two billion degrees!

23 Jan

That’s an astonishing 198,500,0000 degrees hotter than the temperature of the Sun’s core!

How And Where?

The machine that did it is called the ‘Z-Machine‘ which lives at the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico. This truly mind blowing contraption is the largest X-ray generator in the world and uses incredibly high electric currents and magnetic fields to release radiation from atoms. When it’s fully maxed out, it can produce 290 terawatts in a single pulse which is more than enough to study nuclear fusion. That’s hotter than a peppered fart in hell!

What Else?

On top of all that the Z-Machine can propell small plates at 34 kilometres a second, faster than the 30 kilometres per second that Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun. It has also successfully created a special, hyperdense “hot ice” known as ‘Ice VII’, by quickly compressing water to pressures of 70,000 to 120,000 atmospheres.

Also, it looks pretty sweet when you shut it down. The picture is what you see when the thing get’s turned off. That’s slightly better than the ‘Tesla Coil‘ experiment you do at school right?