Wednesday, August 5, 2015

What is the hottest object in the universe?

On a typical day, one contender is the white dwarf that is at the heart of theRed Spider Nebula (NGC 6537).  The surface temperature of that star is around 300,000 K (540,000 R).  That's 50 times hotter than our sun.


Or you could go with a quasar, where the center burns 100 times as much energy as the Milky Way.  The gas around a quasar can reach a temperature of 80 million degrees.



But if you were visiting CERN in July of 2012, you would have been present to see, briefly, the production of a quark-gluon plasma that had a temperature of about 5.5 trillion degrees Kelvin.


And if you'd been present at the Big Bang, you would have observed thePlanck temperature 1.416E32 Kelvin.

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