Researchers Create Hottest Temperature in the Universe
Edward Kinney away from the lab.
Two University of Colorado at Boulder physicists are part of a collaborative team working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York that have created the hottest temperature matter ever measured in the universe — 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.
The team used Brookhaven’s giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, to ram charged gold particles into each other billions of times, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” with a temperature hotter than anything known in the universe, even supernova explosions. The experiment is recreating the conditions of the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.
CU-Boulder physics department Professors Jamie Nagle and Edward Kinney are collaborators on the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX, one of four large detectors that helps physicists analyze the particle collisions using RHIC. PHENIX, which weighs 4,000 tons and has a dozen detector subsystems, sports three large steel magnets that produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths.
RHIC is the only machine in the world capable of colliding so called “heavy ions” — atoms that have had their outer cloud of electrons stripped away. The research team used gold, one of the heaviest elements, for the experiment. The gold atoms were sent flying in opposite directions in RHIC, a 2.4-mile underground loop located in Upton, New York. The collisions melted protons and neutrons and liberated subatomic particles known as quarks and gluons. (more…)
New Gravity-Wave Probe Searches for Big Bang Radiation
The QUIET experiment in operation in the Atacama Desert. The receiver in the mount on the roof of the building rapidly scans the sky, looking for radiation emitted shortly after the birth of the universe.
A tiny fraction of a second following the big bang, the universe allegedly experienced the most inflationary period it has ever known.
During this inflationary era, space expanded faster than the speed of light. It sounds crazy, but it fits a variety of cosmological observations made in recent years, said University of Chicago physicist Bruce Winstein.
“Theorists take it to be true, but we have to prove it,” said Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. “It needs a real test, and that test is whether or not gravity waves were created.” (more…)
Big Bang Theory Challenged
Indiana University astronomer John Salzer has published research on his work uncovering the unique properties of 15 galaxies. (Courtesy of Indiana University)
A team led by an Indiana University astronomer has found a sample of massive galaxies with properties that suggest they may have formed relatively recently. This would run counter to the widely-held belief that massive, luminous galaxies (like our own Milky Way Galaxy) began their formation and evolution shortly after the Big Bang, some 13 billion years ago. Further research into the nature of these objects could open new windows into the study of the origin and early evolution of galaxies.
John Salzer, principal investigator for the study published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, said that the 15 galaxies in the sample exhibit luminosities (a measure of their total light output) that indicate that they are massive systems like the Milky Way and other so-called “giant” galaxies. (more…)
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