The theoretical restrict could also be what known as the Planck temperature, derived utilizing basic common constants.
Employees stroll previous a bit of magnets within the Giant Hadron Collider at CERN, the place researchers are probing plasmas like people who stuffed the early universe. Credit score: Samuel Joseph Hertzog/CERN
All of us settle for that the coldest temperature any object can attain is absolute zero. Is there a theoretical most temperature something can attain?
Stephen Kitterman
Thomasville, North Carolina
Temperature is a measure of the common power of a group of particles. (That is in distinction to kinetic power, which is a measure of the power carried by a single particle.) So, to reply a query about temperature, we’ve got to seek out some assortment of particles to measure.
One such assortment is discovered within the core of our Sun, the place temperatures of about 15 million kelvins (27 million levels Fahrenheit or 15 million levels Celsius) are reached. Very large stars can have core temperatures upwards of 500 million kelvins (900 million F or 500 million C). Simply earlier than a large star explodes as a supernova, some theoretical fashions predict its core can attain temperatures above 100 billion kelvins within the technique of imploding, because it approaches the extraordinarily excessive density of a neutron star.
Earlier than the universe was one second previous, matter was a dense plasma of nucleons and elementary particles at densities larger than that of lead. We will predict the temperature of this plasma, T, in kelvins utilizing the formulation T = 1010/√t, the place t is the time in seconds because the Massive Bang. By 10 microseconds, the common temperature of the universe’s contents is 3 trillion kelvins, equal to the energies that the Giant Hadron Collider explores in quark-gluon plasmas (about 300 million electron volts). However relying on how far again (i.e., nearer in time to the Big Bang) you wish to push, you may get still-higher temperatures.
The theoretical restrict could also be what known as the Planck temperature of 1032 kelvins, derived by utilizing the elemental fixed for gravity (G), the pace of sunshine (c), Planck’s fixed (h), and the Boltzmann fixed (okay). That is believed to be the restrict the place space and time break down as a result of quantum gravity results and you’ll’t put extra power right into a system of particles with out creating quantum black holes in your effort.
Sten Odenwald
Senior Outreach Coordinator, NASA HEAT Program, Kensington, Maryland
