Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas

Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
LiveScience is reporting how scientists at Sandia's Z laboratory have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit (2 billion kelvins). That's hotter than the interior of our sun, which is only 15 million degrees F. And they don't know how they did it. Do we want anything that hot on our planet?

Holy crap! Linkage
 
BlindMonk

BlindMonk

E.M.I.
That's something amazing(ly dangerous, considering they know not the magic they performed), but I actually like the following exchange right beneath it:

Code: 
Summary is wrong yet again
(Score:5, Informative)
by Kasracer (865931) on Wednesday March 08, @08:50PM (#14880116)
(http://www.binaryidiot.com/)
According to the summary, the Sun's interior is 15 million degrees Fahrenheit. According to the article, it's 15 million degrees Kelvin which makes the Sun's interior actually 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

[ Reply to This ]

    *
      Re:Summary is wrong yet again
      (Score:4, Funny)
      by SeeMyNuts! (955740) on Wednesday March 08, @09:42PM (#14880326)
      (http://www.atributetonuts.com/)

      Nice, but what all Slashdotters really want to know is the temperature of Natalie Portman's grits!
      [ Reply to This | Parent ]
          o
            Re:Summary is wrong yet again
            (Score:5, Funny)
            by TubeSteak (669689) on Thursday March 09, @12:45AM (#14881050)
            (Last Journal: Saturday February 25, @11:02PM)

                Nice, but what all Slashdotters really want to know is the temperature of Natalie Portman's grits!

            Natalie Portman's grits?
            You're obviously new here.

            Temperature = Hot
            [ Reply to This | Parent ]
                + Re:Summary is wrong yet again - YONH by Nom du Keyboard (Score:2) Thursday March 09, @10:43AM
                      # Re:Summary is wrong yet again - YONH by swalker42 (Score:1) Thursday March 09, @11:56AM 
                + Re:Summary is wrong yet again by amliebsch (Score:2) Thursday March 09, @10:47AM
                + Re:Summary is wrong yet again by gid-goo (Score:2) Thursday March 09, @11:15AM
                + 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
          o
            Re:Summary is wrong yet again
            (Score:5, Funny)
            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, @03:03AM (#14881385)
            Wow, I thought that joke had died out ages ago. Oh well...
            In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman heats YOUR grits!
            [ Reply to This | Parent ]
                +
                  Re:Summary is wrong yet again
                  (Score:5, Funny)
                  by Ender Ryan (79406) on Thursday March 09, @09:25AM (#14882285)
                  Well that settles it. I'm moving to Soviet Russia!
 
T

T-Shirt

E.M.I.
sbrehm72255 said:
I'd say they better stop before they distroy something important, like a city or something like that.
Click to expand...
It's a little scary that

"They don't know how they did it"

"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."

That sounds more like kids playing with explosives, than a controlled scientific experiment.
 
Last edited:
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
So first off.. how do they even KNOW it got that hot? I mean, how do you get a thermal reading for something that's over 100 times hotter than the sun?

And really, you think if they were anywhere near it, they would not live to tell about it.
 
BlindMonk

BlindMonk

E.M.I.
Rather like those little vials filled with acid in movies, which the villains carry with them and the acidic liquid eats through anything and everything except the container it's kept in. How would they even contain something that hot?
 
Tech-Daddy

Tech-Daddy

Tech Monkey
BlindMonk said:
Rather like those little vials filled with acid in movies, which the villains carry with them and the acidic liquid eats through anything and everything except the container it's kept in. How would they even contain something that hot?
Click to expand...


Excellent point!!!
Wow! Had not thought of that!
 
madstork91

madstork91

The One, The Only...
a possibility is that they have engineered a new element in the form of a gas that once created sparked with its enviroment and burnt out. A simple thermal reading of it using one of those fancy video things could have gotten the temp reading of it.

Now assuming all of that is possible, the way they didnt all get burnt to a crisp lies in the fact that its calorific value upon burning was displaced by the sheilding and surrounding items/enviroment. It quite possibly got VERY hot in the lab.
 
Jakal

Jakal

Tech Monkey
Did you guys actually read the article?

http://www.livescience.com/technology/060308_sandia_z.html

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.
One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Click to expand...

It's pretty much self-explanatory on how they reached the extreme temps. I don't doubt there's other thermal measurements and devices we haven't seen or heard of being used.
 
BlindMonk

BlindMonk

E.M.I.
Jakal said:
Did you guys actually read the article? [...] It's pretty much self-explanatory on how they reached the extreme temps. I don't doubt there's other thermal measurements and devices we haven't seen or heard of being used.
Click to expand...

Of course not -- at least not all of it. I thought all the Interweb had agreed upon rampant speculation and humor... :)
 
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