That new record is 4 trillion degrees Celsius (that’s 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). By doing experiments at that temperature, scientists hope to study what happened just after the universe was born. Four trillion degrees Celsius is 250,000 times hotter than the hottest part of the sun, and probably close to the temperature of the universe right after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe.

The hot stuff is called a quark-gluon plasma, and scientists found it at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. Using a giant instrument called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, the scientists zoomed two gold atoms through a ring that is 2.4 miles around and smashed the atoms together — and then watched to see what came out. There was so much energy in the crash that the atoms, in a way, melted.

Shown is a snapshot from a simulation of gold atoms colliding quickly enough to create high temperatures that “melt out” the quarks and gluons within, creating a quark-gluon plasma.

Brookhaven National Laboratory

As temperatures climb, most solids melt into liquids, and then the liquids become gas. (Some solids may go straight to gas if the conditions are right.) Ice becomes liquid water at 0º Celsius (32º Fahrenheit). At 100º C (212º F), liquid water boils into water vapor. Compared to other substances, water’s melting and boiling points are mild: Tungsten, a material used in light bulbs, doesn’t melt until 3,410º C (6,800º F).

That temperature is freezing compared to 4 trillion degrees C. At that temperature, atoms can break apart — and parts inside an atom can break apart — and then the tiny particles inside those parts can break apart. Think of an atom as a set of nesting dolls. When the largest, outer doll breaks apart, there’s another, smaller doll inside. And when that doll breaks apart … surprise! There’s another doll inside.

Similarly, at the center of every atom is the nucleus. Inside the nucleus are particles called protons and neutrons. And inside protons and neutrons are even smaller particles called quarks. Quarks are held together thanks to another kind of particle called gluons. (Gluons help to “glue” the particle together.)

The hot stuff produced at Brookhaven is a quark-gluon plasma and it spills out like a soup made of quarks and gluons. The quark-gluon plasma is a new type of matter that’s unlike solid, liquid or gas — but it kind of behaves like a liquid.

“We are extremely anxious to find out how this works,” Barbara Jacak told Science News. “Why is it a liquid?”

Jacak works at Stony Brook University in New York and is one of the scientists working on the project at Brookhaven. She helped take the plasma’s temperature. That was a difficult task because it’s hard to measure things that small. The plasma only existed for about one-trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and it was tiny, about one-trillionth of a centimeter across.

It was a very small piece of space that was super hot for a very short amount of time. In other words, you can’t just put a thermometer in it, Jacak says.

To take the temperature, the researchers watched it glow. A hot iron rod changes color from red to yellow to white as it heats up. In a similar way, the colors of light coming from the plasma changed. Based on what colors of light the soup emitted, the team figured out that the substance had reached the 4-trillion-degree record.

By studying these kinds of super-hot temperatures, scientists hope to learn more about how the universe formed. The quark-gluon plasma may look a lot like the hot and heavy goo that existed in the universe right after the Big Bang.

Experiments such as those at Brookhaven may help us understand what happened at the very beginning of the universe. But there’s a lot of work to be done, says scientist Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. “These are very early days,” he told Science News. “Like many good observations, this opens up many questions.”

Going Deeper:

Sanders, Laura. 2010. “Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever,” Science News, February 15. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56379/title/Hot_and_heavy_matter_runs_a_4_trillion_degree_fever
Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The Particle Zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp
Cowen, Ron. 2010. “New galaxies may be the farthest back in time and space yet.” Science News, January 30.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/52404/title/New-found_galaxies_may_be_farthest_back_in_time_and_space_yet

See the video and information from Brookhaven. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/physics.asp

The football-field–size machine, called a synchrotron, uses tubes, magnets, vacuum pumps, and other gadgetry to produce intensely powerful beams of light. The giant contraption looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

From above, the Australian synchrotron doesn’t look like much. Inside the football-field–size machine, tiny but powerful experiments are going on.

Australian Synchrotron Project

But it’s no fantasy. Real scientists are using these huge machines to look deeper than ever into the structure of atoms and cells. The work is giving them insights into our bodies and our world.

“Every kid knows about microscopes that let you see what the eye can’t see,” says Daniel Häusermann, an imaging and medical therapy scientist. He works with the Australian synchrotron, which began conducting experiments in April 2007.

“This is [like] the next level of microscope,” Häusermann says. “We always want to see … the unknown. This is what is fascinating.”

Fast particles

The Australian synchrotron is a type of machine called a particle accelerator. To understand how it works, you have to know some things about matter—the “stuff” that makes up everything in the universe.

All matter is made up of tiny particles called atoms. There are more than 100 types of atoms, including hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Just like the 26 letters of our alphabet combine to make up all the words in our language, atoms combine into molecules to make up everything we know. One atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen, for example, form a molecule of water.

But atoms themselves are made up of even smaller particles. There are three types of such particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons.

And it is electrons that make synchrotrons tick. These particles have electric charges. When electrons move, they create electric currents.

Inside a synchrotron, big magnets, like the six shown above, help get electrons moving at nearly the speed of light.

Australian Synchrotron Project

A synchrotron uses giant magnets, radio waves, and something called an electron gun to push electrons until they move at a blistering 99.9987 percent of the speed of light. That’s almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second. Nothing we know of moves faster than light.

Once the electrons get moving in the synchrotron, they travel through a large, ring-shaped tube that measures 216 meters (709 feet) around. The electrons make 1.34 million laps around the ring in a single second. Moving at that rate, they could zoom around the world seven times in the same amount of time.

Follow the numbers to track the movement of electrons through a synchrotron. The electrons pick up speed as they zoom through the inner ring. Numbers 5 and 6 show where a powerful beam of light emerges at perpendicular angle from the central ring.

Australian Synchrotron Project

Electrons moving that quickly produce extremely bright light. Inside the synchrotron, magnets direct this light into beams, called beamlines, which come out of the machine in straight lines perpendicular to the central ring (see illustration above).

A technician examines the inner workings of the Australian synchrotron.

Australian Synchrotron Project

A synchrotron’s beamlines are between 30,000 and 30 million times as bright as the light that comes out of a laser pointer. Because synchrotrons create such strong, focused light, these machines can be used for a huge range of applications, from designing life-saving therapies to creating tastier chocolate.

“In the world of synchrotrons, you meet people who do everything,” Häusermann says, including chemists, doctors, and food researchers. “It’s more interesting than any world I’ve seen.”

Working with light

Light comes in a range of energies, called wavelengths. Some wavelengths of light we can see. Of those, we see different wavelengths in different colors. The color red, for example, has lower energy than the color violet. Other wavelengths, including high-energy X rays and low-energy infrared light, are invisible to human eyes.

Each beamline in a synchrotron is designed to emit just one type of light with a very specific amount of energy. The Australian synchrotron can produce light at wavelengths ranging from infrared to X rays. Each type of light can be used for very different purposes.

Scientists already use different types of light to do different things. Night-vision goggles, for example, use infrared light to reveal pockets of heat, allowing the wearer to “see” in the dark. And X-ray machines allow doctors to see through a patient’s skin and muscle all the way to the bone.

Because synchrotron beamlines are so powerful, they can be used for even more high-tech applications. Infrared beamlines, for example, can be used to study fragile archaeological remains and to examine processes inside living cells. Häusermann, for one, plans to work with a beamline that will produce superpowerful X rays for medical applications.

Researcher Daniel Häusermann plans to use the Australian synchrotron to see inside the human body in greater detail than ever before.

Emily Sohn

Now under construction, this X-ray beamline intended for medical purposes will travel 150 meters (492 feet) in a straight line away from the central ring through a tunnel into another building.

At the point where the beam emerges from the machine, it will measure just 1 cm (0.4 inch) across. The beam will get wider as it travels. By the time it gets to its destination, it will be 60 cm (24 inches) wide.

“We will have the widest [synchrotron X-ray] beam in the world,” Häusermann says.

He and colleagues plan on using the beamline to help cancer patients. The beam’s great width will allow the researchers to easily examine an entire body part, such as the chest. Though conventional X rays already allow researchers to see inside the body, the synchrotron’s powerful X-ray beams will allow doctors to see inside a single cell.

Better images will give all doctors a clearer window into the workings of the human body, Häusermann says, even those who don’t have the time or money to use synchrotron technology.

“The whole medical community learns from what is being done in the synchrotron,” he says.

The synchrotron can be used to treat diseases, as well as to diagnose them. For example, doctors also often use X rays to kill cancer cells. Radiation treatments are imprecise, however, and many healthy cells die in the process. That makes cancer patients feel sick. By using the highly focused synchrotron X-ray beam, scientists hope to destroy individual cancer cells without harming healthy tissues.

This illustration shows a high-powered beamline emerging from the synchrotron into an experimental booth.

Australian Synchrotron Project

So far, five beamlines are working at the Australian synchrotron. Four more are under development. Eventually, there may be as many as 30.

Solving mysteries

Medicine isn’t the only field benefiting from synchrotron technology. In 1998, a chocolate company in the United Kingdom used the UK synchrotron to study individual molecules during the production of chocolate.

The synchrotron’s X-ray beam revealed that the company was keeping the temperature too high for too long while processing the chocolate, says Stefanie Pearce, communications manager at the Australian synchrotron. The company changed its production methods. The result? A smoother, better-tasting chocolate.

SNK reporter Emily Sohn marvels at the complexity of the Australian synchrotron.

Hannah Hoag

By revealing molecule-size details such as these, synchrotrons have also helped scientists create more-absorbent baby diapers, better packaging for potato chips, and higher-performing jet engines.

Synchrotron techniques are also helpful in solving crimes. That’s because they can identify specks of sweat, poison, and counterfeit ink that are undetectable by conventional forensic techniques.

Researchers can even use synchrotrons to solve historical mysteries. Consider, for example, the mysterious death of Phar Lap, one of the greatest racehorses that ever lived.

In 1932, at the height of his career, Phar Lap was suddenly stricken with a high fever and severe pain. He died soon after, and an examination showed an inflamed stomach. Immediately, people began wondering whether the horse had been poisoned.

Firm proof did not come until 2006, when Australian researchers used a synchrotron’s X-ray beam to analyze a sample of Phar Lap’s hair. The test revealed traces of arsenic. The scientists concluded that it was almost certain the horse had been poisoned with a large dose of this toxic chemical.

The list of synchrotron applications goes on and on. And the work, Häusermann says, is endlessly fascinating.

“We’re just big kids,” he says, “Playing with expensive toys.”

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Word Find: Light Power

Government and utility officials are still scrambling to explain a blackout that hit much of the northeastern United States in late summer. From Detroit to New York, lights went out. Refrigerators, traffic signals, elevators, and subway trains stopped working. Computers went dead.

Lightning over a darkened city.

Without electricity, people had trouble getting to work, shopping for groceries, and communicating with each other. Normal life pretty much shut down for a few days.

Electricity also plays a crucial role within the human body. A lightning bolt or shock can disrupt or shut down that flow, causing disability or death.

“Electricity is life,” says David Rhees, executive director of the Bakken Library and Museum in Minneapolis. The Bakken museum is dedicated entirely to the history and applications of electricity and magnetism in biology and medicine.

The museum has a lot to keep up with. As scientists learn more about the electrical signals that whiz through our bodies and the electrical pulses that tell our hearts to beat, they are finding new ways to use electricity to save lives.

Research on the nervous systems of animals and people are helping scientists design machines that help diagnose and treat brain conditions and other problems. New drugs are being developed to regulate the body’s electrical pulses when things go wrong in response to injury or disease.

Electricity everywhere

Electricity is everywhere, thanks to the unique structure of the universe. Matter, which is basically everything you see and touch, is made up of tiny units called atoms. Atoms themselves are made up of even tinier parts called protons and neutrons, which form the atom’s core, and electrons, which move around outside the core.

Protons have a positive electrical charge, and electrons have a negative electrical charge. Normally, an atom has an equal number of electrons and protons. The positive and negative charges cancel each other out, so the atom is neutral.

When an atom gains an extra electron, it becomes negatively charged. When an atom loses an electron, it becomes positively charged. When the conditions are right, such charge imbalances can generate a current of electrons. This flow of electrons (or electrically charged particles) is what we call electricity.

The first person to discover that electricity plays a role in animals was Luigi Galvani, who lived in Italy in the late 18th century. He found that electricity can cause a dissected frog’s leg to twitch, showing a connection between electrical currents traveling along an animal’s nerve and the action of muscles.

Quick signals

All animals that move have electricity in their bodies, says Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at New York University’s School of Medicine. Everything we see, hear, and touch gets translated into electrical signals that travel between the brain and the body via special nerve cells called neurons.

Electricity is the only thing that’s fast enough to carry the messages that make us who we are, Llinas says. “Our thoughts, our ability to move, see, dream, all of that is fundamentally driven and organized by electrical pulses,” he says. “It’s almost like what happens in a computer but far more beautiful and complicated.”

By attaching wires to the outside of the body, doctors can monitor the electrical activity inside. One special machine records the heart’s electrical activity to produce an electrocardiogram (EKG)—strings of squiggles that show what the heart is doing. Another machine produces a pattern of squiggles (called an EEG) that represents the electrical activity of neurons in the brain.

This recording of brain waves, called an EEG, represents the electrical activity of neurons in the brain.

One of the newest technologies, called MEG, goes even further. It actually produces maps of magnetic fields caused by electrical activity in the brain, instead of just squiggles.

Recent observations of patterns of nerve-cell action have given scientists a much better view of how electricity works in the body, Llinas says. “The difference between now and 20 years ago is not even astronomical,” he says. “It’s galactic.”

Now, researchers are looking for new ways to use electricity to help people with spinal injuries or disorders of the nervous system, such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or epilepsy.

People with Parkinson’s disease, for example, often end up having tremors and being unable to move. One type of treatment involves drugs that change the way nerve cells communicate with each other. As part of another new treatment, doctors put tiny wires on the head that send electrical impulses into the patient’s brain. “As soon as you put that in,” Llinas says, “the person can move again.”

Philip Kennedy at Emory University in Atlanta has even invented a kind of “thought control” to help severely paralyzed people communicate with the outside world. His invention, called a neurotrophic electrode, is a hollow glass cone filled with wires and chemicals. With an implanted electrode, a patient who can’t move at all can still control the movement of a cursor across a computer screen.

Looking to the past

One way to help keep the medical field speeding into the future might be to cultivate an appreciation for the past. At least, that’s what the folks at the Bakken museum think.

Modern-day medical equipment powered by electricity.

When I recently visited the museum, Rhees and Kathleen Klehr, the museum’s public relations manager, took me down to a huge padlocked room in the basement called “The Vault.” Row upon row of shelves were crammed with rare, old books about electricity, early versions of pacemakers and hearing aids, and all sorts of weird devices. One was a shoe-store X-ray machine, powered by electricity, that showed you whether your foot fit comfortably into a new shoe.

Upstairs, the exhibits included a tank of electric fish and Hopi dolls dedicated to the spirit of lightning.

There’s also a whole room dedicated to a monster made famous in a book titled Frankenstein. Made from assorted human parts, the monster was brought to life by an electrical spark. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, electricity was still a relatively new idea, and people were fascinated by the possibilities of what they might be able to do with it.

Even today, the Frankenstein room, with its scary multimedia presentation, remains one of the Bakken’s most popular exhibits, Klehr told me. “It’s been centuries,” she says, “and everyone is still excited about Frankenstein.”

That’s something you might keep in mind the next time a blackout strikes. Without electricity, those monsters under your bed might have a lot less power over you!

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