Hottest Thing on Earth

Hottest Thing on Earth: X-Rays Heat Metal to 3.6 Million Degrees

The chamber in which aluminum wasconverted to "hot dense matter" via x-ray bombardment. By zapping a piece of aluminum with the world's most powerful x-ray laser, physicists have heated matter to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius)—making it briefly the hottest thing on Earth.

The state of matter called a quark gluon plasma existed in the milliseconds after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, smashed heavy lead ions together at close to the speed of light.

They generated temperatures of more than 1.6 trillion degrees Celsius, 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

In the process they recreated the densest material ever observed - only black holes are denser.