Scientists re-create high temperatures from Big Bang
HOW HOT IS HOT?
A few comparisons to the 7.2-trillion-degree (Fahrenheit) heat inside the atoms smashed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider:
• 98.6 degrees: Human body temperature
• 2,800 degrees: Iron's melting point
• 27 million degrees: Sun's core
• 180 billion degrees: Supernova
• 7.2 trillion degrees: Big Bang (after one microsecond)
• 18,000 trillion-trillion degrees: Big Bang (after one-millionth of a microsecond)
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds.
The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova.
Scientists say the results have given them insight into the moments after the universe began 13.7 billion years ago.
"The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was designed to re-create conditions in the infant universe," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor said at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C.
"These (collision) temperatures are hot enough to melt protons," Vigdor says, likely forming a soup of subatomic particles freed from the interior of atoms, called a "quark-gluon" plasma.
"It is new and important evidence showing that an exotic form of matter, last seen in the Big Bang, has been formed," says physicist Thomas Cohen of the University of Maryland in College Park, who was not part of the experiment. "It is not quite a 'smoking gun' in that it is also somewhat indirect and requires modeling to interpret the data. However, it is quite impressive."
Most intriguing to physicists, the teams reporting in two papers in the Physical Review Letters journal also discovered signs of "symmetry-breaking" behavior in the collision bubbles. That means charged particles immersed in a powerful magnetic field within the bubbles moved in directions opposite to what is seen in today's universe.
Such behavior offers an explanation for why the early universe produced more matter than antimatter, which has been a puzzle to cosmologists. Their observations of today's particles suggest the two kinds of mutually annihilating stuff, matter and antimatter, should have been produced in equal amounts by the Big Bang. But non-symmetrical particle behavior in the early universe would have led to the creation of more normal matter, the stuff of stars and planets.
"We all like symmetry, but we really owe our existence to imperfection," says Brookhaven theorist Dmitri Kharzeev.
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