We Made the Hottest Thing in the Universe, on Earth

The hottest temperature ever recorded wasn't found in space. We made it, here on Earth.

Inside a particle collider, physicists smashed atomic nuclei together at nearly the speed of light, and for a flicker of a second, hit around 5 trillion degrees Celsius.

That is hotter than the core of any star, hotter even than a supernova. At those temperatures, ordinary matter cannot survive. Protons and neutrons melt, releasing the particles inside them, quarks and gluons, into a state called quark-gluon plasma. It's the same substance that filled the universe in its first instant. The plasma exists for less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second before cooling and freezing back into normal particles. But in that flash, inside a machine buried under the ground, we briefly recreated the conditions of the newborn cosmos.

Think about that. The hottest place we know of in the entire universe, right now, is a tiny spot inside a tunnel on planet Earth.

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