A video from Brookhaven Lab explains why the Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider, or RHIC, is producing temperatures up to 4
trillion degrees Celsius. What's hotter than Justin Bieber and
Emma Stone put together? Guinness World Records says the hottest
stuff made by humans is the multitrillion-degree quark-gluon
plasma that was produced two years ago at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC.
The plasma, also known as big-bang soup, reached a temperature
of 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit),
which is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Why so
hot? RHIC's physicists were seeking to duplicate the conditions
that existed just an instant after the big bang that kicked off
the universe's expansion 13.7 billion years ago. At that
temperature, the quarks and gluons that are almost always bound
together in protons, neutrons and the like are jumping around in
a free, soupy state. Studying that soup could reveal how the
universe is put together