The Hottest Moment in the History of Everything

The hottest place that has ever existed isn't a star. It's a moment, and it will never come again.

Roll the clock back 13.8 billion years, to the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The entire universe was smaller than an atom, and unimaginably hot.

Back then, it was far too hot for atoms, or even for protons and neutrons, to exist. Everything was a searing soup of the most basic particles, quarks and gluons, packed at trillions of trillions of degrees. As the universe expanded, it cooled. Within a millionth of a second, quarks locked together into protons and neutrons. Minutes later, the first atomic nuclei formed. The cosmos has been cooling ever since, for billions of years.

So the universe peaked at its very first instant. Nothing built afterward, no star, no supernova, no exploding black hole, has ever come close. The hottest event in all of time is already behind us.

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