http://www.livescience.com/technolog..._sandia_z.html

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.
This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.
They don't know how they did it.
The feat was accomplished in the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."
Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.
The achievement was detailed in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world. It’s designed to test materials under extreme temperatures and pressures. It works by releasing 20 million amps of electricity into a vertical array of very fine tungsten wires. The wires dissolve into a cloud of charged particles, a superheated gas called plasma.
A very strong magnetic field compresses the plasma into the thickness of a pencil lead. This causes the plasma to release energy in the form of X-rays, but the X-rays are usually only several million degrees.
Sandia researchers still aren’t sure how the machine achieved the new record. Part of it is probably due to the replacement of the tungsten steel wires with slightly thicker steel wires, which allow the plasma ions to travel faster and thus achieve higher temperatures.
One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down.
Sandia National Laboratories is located by Albuquerque New Mexico and is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

I really hope they don't go and melt the planet.

But hey, maybe now we can burn off all of our stockpiles of VX!

But how do they measure that temperature? Surely any thermometer will melt....

Originally Posted by PJ24

I really hope they don't go and melt the planet.

But hey, maybe now we can burn off all of our stockpiles of VX!

Let's hope so. That stuff is something that never should have even been entertained for being produced.

Originally Posted by Ted

But how do they measure that temperature? Surely any thermometer will melt....

They keep adding precise heat absorbing shielding until they have enough known dissipation and add the known dissipation and the thermovoltaic (thermocouple) device reading. It's the same way the power produced by a laser is read by using known filters stacked until the output is a readable level, sunglasses in other words.

Hmmm...

Maybe they finally stumbled on a source of new enegry. They have no clue what energy source causes the increased heat.

Originally Posted by Missileer

They keep adding precise heat absorbing shielding until they have enough known dissipation and add the known dissipation and the thermovoltaic (thermocouple) device reading. It's the same way the power produced by a laser is read by using known filters stacked until the output is a readable level, sunglasses in other words.

Thanks Missileer, so I learned something new today....again.

What kills me is when the plasma starts to drop in temperature, the maximum heat is produced after a delay. Personally, I think they have an artifact, probably produced by the method of measurement. If they used a spectrometer, as when the temperature of planets and stars are calculated, there is room for error. If they are measuring the heat using the common method using a remote thermal device, then someone has a paper to publish.

That's really cool!

stop makeing me feel stupid missilier.