The Boomerang Nebula: colder than the emptiness of space itself. The highest temperature in the Universe. Spectral classes of stars The hottest thing in the universe
It is unlikely that this temperature record will be broken; at the moment of birth, our Universe had a temperature of about 10 32 K, and by the word “moment” we here mean not a second, but a Planck unit of time equal to 5 10 -44 seconds. During this literally immeasurably short time, the Universe was so hot that we have no idea by what laws it existed; Even fundamental particles do not exist at such energies.
2. TANK
Second place in the list of the hottest places (or moments in time, in this case there is no difference) after the Big Bang is our blue planet. In 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists collided heavy ions accelerated to 99% of the speed of light and for a brief moment received a temperature of 5.5 trillion Kelvin (5 * 10 12) (or degrees Celsius - on such scales it’s the same thing).
3. Neutron stars
10 11 K - this is the temperature inside a newborn neutron star. The substance at this temperature is not at all similar to the forms we are familiar with. The interior of neutron stars consists of a bubbling “soup” of electrons, neutrons and other elements. In just a few minutes, the star cools down to 10 9 K, and in the first hundred years of its existence - by an order of magnitude.
4. Nuclear explosion
The temperature inside the fireball of a nuclear explosion is about 20,000 K. This is higher than the surface temperature of most main sequence stars.
5. The hottest stars (except neutron stars)
The surface temperature of the Sun is about six thousand degrees, but this is not the limit for stars; The hottest star known today, WR 102 in the constellation Sagittarius, is heated to 210,000 K—ten times hotter than an atomic explosion. There are relatively few such hot stars (about a hundred of them were found in the Milky Way, and the same number in other galaxies), they are 10-15 times more massive than the Sun and much brighter than it.
Scientists talk about the origin of the Universe, the nature of the mysterious dark matter, 21st century medicine and the existence of a particle that the world did not know about until these days.
On Saturday, the international conference Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) 2015, dedicated to the work of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other units of the international high energy laboratory CERN, ended in our city.
On the verge of opening
Physicists speak cautiously about the main scientific outcome of the conference.
“There is a pattern: every new quality appears with an increase in energy. And in 1976, when we realized that elementary particles are not protons, but quarks. And in 2012, when the Higgs boson was discovered. Now we have doubled the energy - maybe we will discover something. “Some things have already been said at the meeting, but we cannot say for sure without preliminary results,”
– explains Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of High Energy Physics of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics of the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” Alexey Vorobyov.
Most likely, the academician is talking about the discovery of new particles similar to photons, but with a very large mass.
St. Petersburg State University professor Alexander Andrianov talks about them in more detail:
“They are hardly elementary. There is a techno theory (like a branch of “techno” music) that suggests that vector bosons consist of techno-quarks, which themselves do not interact with us.”
There are such particles of 10 to the minus 24th power of seconds, but their influence on modern physics is enormous.
Intensification-2015
Speaking about upcoming discoveries, the professor warns that increasing the accelerator power is not the only way to obtain significant results:
“Striving for greater energies is not always useful. Because the temperature increases from them, and the nuclear density becomes very small. Sometimes you need an intermediate state – more current and a little less energy.”
Therefore, St. Petersburg physicists have developed a system that increases the intensity of the particle flow by 10 times.
“Like all Russian inventors - with the help of a simple device and ingenuity,”
– Georgy Feofilov, head of the St. Petersburg State University laboratory and head of the St. Petersburg State University group in the ALICE collaboration, laughs.
Made in Russia
Holding the event in St. Petersburg reflects the contribution of our fellow countrymen to the international project.
“The ideas that Russian scientists brought have no analogues,”
– states CERN Deputy Director General for Science Sergio Bertolucci.
Professor at the University of Freiburg, member of the Committee for the European Strategy for High Energy Physics, founder and former head of the ATLAS collaboration, Peter Jenny, tells more about the work of his colleagues:
“The participation of Russian institutes in the project began about 20 years ago, already at that time your physicists had an understanding of how to conduct experiments at the LHC. Some of these ideas have been implemented. What our Russian colleagues have done works perfectly.”
Thus, the ideas that arose in St. Petersburg became the basis for the creation of the ALICE collaboration, a division of CERN that studies primordial matter formed immediately after the Big Bang.
“The engineering and scientific potential of our city made it possible to develop proposals that were submitted to CERN in 1992 and are still in use today. Now at St. Petersburg State University they are modernizing the detectors of the ALICE installation, and university students have joined the process,” says Grigory Feofilov.
Almost like in football
In total, more than eight hundred physicists, engineers and programmers from Russia work at CERN. Only three countries - Italy, Germany and France, as well as the United States, which are not part of the association - can boast of a large presence.
But holding the conference in St. Petersburg has another aspect, a political one. It is voiced by Vladimir Shevchenko, Deputy Director of the Center for Fundamental Research of the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”:
“Why do we like to hold football championships in Russia? Because organizers always have some advantages. In addition, holding such a large forum in our country is a reminder of us as a major player. A power that has its own interests.”
Before us is a portal to a new world
“Those who say that the collider is the hottest place in the Universe are not mistaken. When nuclei collide, accelerated almost to the speed of light, matter becomes something very interesting to study, admits Grigory Feofilov. “Provides keys to discoveries in the field of astrophysics, influences fundamental science - understanding the standard model and deviations from it.”
The temperature during the experiments is measured in trillions of degrees, that is, hundreds of times higher than the temperature of the Sun.
As for the Standard Model, the constant subject of discussion remains the Higgs boson, or “Higgs” as scientists call it for short, discovered at the LHC in 2012. This elementary particle confirmed the validity of the basic theoretical structure of modern physics and at the same time brought humanity beyond the standard model, into unknown dimensions.
“It is important to understand that the Higgs is not “another particle,” but a representative of a new type of matter with spin zero. A portal to a new world is opening before us; finding out what awaits beyond the gates is a task for many years for the entire scientific community,”
predicts Vladimir Shevchenko.
His Dark Materials
There are other forecasts.
“The most exciting discovery ahead of us must be the solution to the mystery of dark matter. We can get the result either by increasing the energy in the accelerator, or by making more accurate particle measurements,"
Peter hopes Yennie.
Dark matter truly remains the main mystery of our century - the Universe is 96% composed of this substance, but we can neither see it nor register it, only determine its existence by its effect on the visible 4%. Understanding what dark matter is will likely change our entire understanding of reality. But even these amazing discoveries do not exhaust the capabilities of CERN.
“I don’t know what nature will reveal to us next,”
– CERN Deputy Director General for Science Sergio Bertolucci honestly admits.
Only for patients
There are also more understandable results of the accelerator. It was at CERN that hadron therapy arose - the use of beams of charged particles for targeted irradiation of tumors. The effect occurs so locally that it does not affect healthy tissue.
“This is a fusion of high-energy physics and the latest medical technologies, which gives very high performance,”
– notes Grigory Feofilov.
The construction of two private proton centers is planned in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The greater spread of hadron medicine in Russia is hampered by imperfect legislation, explains Vladimir Shevchenko: a physicist does not have the right to provide medical services, and a doctor does not know high-energy physics.
Waiting for the end of the world
In the eyes of the average person, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are most often associated not with great discoveries, but with a global catastrophe.
Seven years ago, scientists from CERN were even tried for trying to organize the end of the world.
The idea of society is well expressed by a picture in which a bandaged scientist tells a journalist: “With the help of the LHC, we learned that the Universe appeared as a result of an explosion.” Or a T-shirt with four sleeves that says “I survived the launch of the Hadron Collider.”
Physicists know about such jokes and respond ironically.
“If a black hole is discovered at CERN, it will be a major scientific discovery. True, its price will also be high - all of humanity will disappear,” says Alexey Vorobyov.
However, it is too early to despair. Physics teaches that a small black hole should evaporate, and not completely absorb the universe.
Everything has already happened
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Dubna) Viktor Matveev advises to remain calm:
“It is difficult for a person who does not deal with physics to imagine the scale of the processes. Experiments in the laboratory only repeat what happened in the Universe. Everything that could happen has already happened. If it had catastrophic consequences, you and I would no longer exist.”
From the fact that we exist, the conclusion follows: the Large Hadron Collider does not pose a danger to humanity. And this proof should be understandable even to people who are infinitely far from high-energy physics.
The unusual object was discovered using the latest ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope operating in the high-altitude Chilean Atacama Desert in South America. The contender for the title of coldest object has a temperature of just 1 degree Kelvin, or minus 272.15 degrees Celsius.
nasa.gov
The Boomerang Nebula is just one degree above absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature at which the lightest chemical element, hydrogen, freezes. Scientists working with ALMA say the nebula is barely visible against the background of the Universe's microwave background, which is residual radiation from the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago. It is believed that the microwave background has the lowest possible temperature and against its background all other objects in the Universe are warmer, therefore, they have thermal radiation and are visible in the infrared spectrum of observations.
However, the Boomerang Nebula is practically invisible here; the telescope captured only the boomerang-shaped outlines of this nebula, which indicates the extremely low temperature of this object. Scientists say the nebula's low temperature is only one side of the coin. Another is that this nebula has a slight optical glow, which cannot be explained by modern scientific knowledge. However, scientists say that modern physics knows very little about ultra-cold space objects and much of the data here is either incomplete or based on an unconfirmed theory.
The Boomerang Nebula itself is an object 5,000 light years away from us in the constellation Centaurus. This is a fairly young object, which adds intrigue, since it is unclear how such a cold object could arise in the modern part of the Universe. It is possible that there are several small or dying stars at the center of the nebula that give it its luminosity, but this has not yet been confirmed.
Scientists say that the nebula is a pre-planetary object, that is, there are no star systems like ours, therefore, there are no planets here either. It is likely that such a low temperature of the nebula is due precisely to the work of those very stars. This creates an effect similar to that in refrigerators. The stars simply take all the heat from the nebula, leaving it in the form of a giant freezer. At the same time, the light of the stars pierces the entire nebula and the gas-dust clouds in it begin to glow.
Note that the Boomerang Nebula was discovered back in 2003 using the Hubble telescope, but this telescope does not have a temperature monitoring system, so the temperature of the Nebula has not yet been clarified. After ten years of research, scientists who first identified the shape of a gas cloud in the constellation Centaurus as a bow tie or hourglass are now comparing it to a ghost. Experts, examining Boomerang, noticed that the nebula is enveloped in an elongated shell, which is shaped like a ghost.
The substance that ranks first on this list has not existed for almost 15 billion years. And in second place is our Earth, more precisely, the particle accelerator near Geneva, where in 2012 they obtained a temperature higher than which the Universe has not known since the beginning of time.
In this article:
1. Big Bang
It is unlikely that this temperature record will be broken; at the moment of birth, our Universe had a temperature of about 1032 K, and by the word “moment” we mean here not a second, but a Planck unit of time equal to 5 10-44 seconds. During this literally immeasurably short time, the Universe was so hot that we have no idea by what laws it existed; Even fundamental particles do not exist at such energies.
2. TANK
Second place in the list of the hottest places (or moments in time, in this case there is no difference) after the Big Bang is our blue planet. In 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists collided heavy ions accelerated to 99% of the speed of light and for a brief moment received a temperature of 5.5 trillion Kelvin (5 * 1012) (or degrees Celsius - on such scales it’s the same thing).
3. Neutron stars
1011 K is the temperature inside a newborn neutron star. The substance at this temperature is not at all similar to the forms we are familiar with. The interior of neutron stars consists of a bubbling “soup” of electrons, neutrons and other elements. In just a few minutes, the star cools down to 10 9 K, and in the first hundred years of its existence - by an order of magnitude.
4. Nuclear explosion
The temperature inside the fireball of a nuclear explosion is about 20,000 K. This is higher than the surface temperature of most main sequence stars.
5. The hottest stars (except neutron stars)
The surface temperature of the Sun is about six thousand degrees, but this is not the limit for stars; The hottest star known today, WR 102 in the constellation Sagittarius, is heated to 210,000 K—ten times hotter than an atomic explosion. There are relatively few such hot stars (about a hundred of them were found in the Milky Way, and the same number in other galaxies), they are 10-15 times more massive than the Sun and much brighter than it.
Did you know that the most massive star weighs 265 times more than the Sun? Read the post and learn a lot of interesting things.
No. 10. The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest place in the Universe
The Boomerang Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus at a distance of 5000 light years from Earth. The nebula's temperature is −272 °C, making it the coldest known place in the Universe.
The gas flow coming from the central star of the Boomerang Nebula moves at a speed of 164 km/s and is constantly expanding. Because of this rapid expansion, the temperature in the nebula is so low. The Boomerang Nebula is cooler than even the relic radiation from the Big Bang.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott named the object the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The sensitivity of the instrument made it possible to detect only a small asymmetry in the lobes of the nebula, which gave rise to the assumption of a curved shape, like a boomerang.
The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, after which it was realized that the nebula was shaped like a bow tie, but that name had already been taken.
R136a1 lies 165,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This blue hypergiant is the most massive star known to science. The star is also one of the brightest, emitting up to 10 million times more light than the Sun.
The star's mass is 265 solar masses, and its mass at formation was more than 320.
R136a1 was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Sheffield led by Paul Crowther on June 21, 2010.
The question of the origin of such supermassive stars still remains unclear: whether they were formed with such a mass initially, or whether they formed from several smaller stars.
In the image from left to right: a red dwarf, the Sun, a blue giant, and R136a1.
No. 8. SDSS J0100+2802 – the brightest quasar with the oldest black hole
SDSS J0100+2802 is a quasar located 12.8 billion light years from the Sun. It is notable for the fact that the Black Hole feeding it has a mass of 12 billion solar masses, which is 3000 times larger than the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The luminosity of the quasar SDSS J0100+2802 exceeds that of the sun by 42 trillion times. And the Black Hole is the oldest known. The object was formed 900 million years after the supposed Big Bang.
Quasar SDSS J0100+2802 was discovered by astronomers from the Chinese province of Yunnan using the 2.4 m Lijiang Telescope on December 29, 2013.
No. 7. WASP-33 b (HD 15082 b) – the hottest planet
Planet WASP-33 b is an exoplanet near the white main sequence star HD 15082 in the constellation Andromeda. The diameter is slightly larger than Jupiter. In 2011, the temperature of the planet was measured with extreme precision - about 3200 °C, which makes it the hottest known exoplanet.
No. 6. The Orion Nebula is the brightest nebula
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M 42 or NGC 1976) is the brightest diffuse nebula. It is clearly visible in the night sky with the naked eye, and can be seen almost anywhere on Earth. The Orion Nebula is located about 1,344 light-years from Earth and is 33 light-years across.
This lonely planet was discovered by Philippe Delorme using the powerful ESO telescope. The main feature of the planet is that it is completely alone in space. It is more familiar to us that planets revolve around a star. But CFBDSIR2149 is not that kind of planet. It is alone, and the closest star is too far away to exert a gravitational influence on the planet.
Scientists have found similar lonely planets before, but the great distance prevented their study. Studying the lone planet will allow us to "learn more about how planets can be ejected from planetary systems."
No. 4. Cruithney is an asteroid with an orbit identical to Earth
Cruitney is a near-Earth asteroid moving in a 1:1 orbital resonance with the Earth, while crossing the orbits of three planets at once: Venus, Earth and Mars. It is also called a quasi-satellite of the Earth.
Cruithney was discovered on October 10, 1986 by British amateur astronomer Duncan Waldron using the Schmidt telescope. Cruithney's first temporary designation was 1986 TO. The asteroid's orbit was calculated in 1997.
Thanks to orbital resonance with the Earth, the asteroid flies through its orbit for almost one Earth year (364 days), that is, at any given time, the Earth and Cruithney are at the same distance from each other as they were a year ago.
There is no danger of this asteroid colliding with the Earth, at least for the next few million years.
No. 3. Gliese 436 b - a planet of hot ice
Gliese 436 b was discovered by American astronomers in 2004. The planet is comparable in size to Neptune; the mass of Gliese 436 b is equal to 22 Earth masses.
In May 2007, Belgian scientists led by Michael Gillon from the University of Liege established that the planet consists mainly of water. Water is in the solid state of ice under high pressure and at a temperature of about 300 degrees Celsius, which leads to the “hot ice” effect. Gravity creates enormous pressure on water, the molecules of which turn into ice. And even despite the ultra-high temperature, water is not able to evaporate from the surface. Therefore, Gliese 436 b is a very unique planet.
No. 2. El Gordo - the largest cosmic structure in the early Universe
A galaxy cluster is a complex superstructure consisting of several galaxies. Cluster ACT-CL J0102-4915, informally named El Gordo, was discovered in 2011 and is considered the largest cosmic structure in the early Universe. According to the latest calculations by scientists, this system is 3 quadrillion times more massive than the Sun. The El Gordo cluster is located 7 billion light years from Earth.
According to the results of a new study, El Gordo is the result of the merger of two clusters that collide at speeds of several million kilometers per hour.
No. 1. 55 Cancer E – diamond planet
Planet 55 Cancri e was discovered in 2004 in the planetary system of the sun-like star 55 Cancri A. The mass of the planet is almost 9 times greater than the mass of the Earth.
The temperature on the side facing the mother star is +2400°C, and is a giant ocean of lava; on the shadow side the temperature is +1100°C.
According to new research, 55 Cancer e contains a large proportion of carbon in its composition. It is believed that a third of the planet's mass is made up of thick layers of diamond. At the same time, there is almost no water in the planet. The planet is located 40 light years from Earth.
P.S.
The mass of the Earth is 5.97 × 10 to the 24th power kg
Giant planets of the Solar System:
Jupiter has a mass 318 times that of Earth
Saturn has a mass 95 times that of Earth
Uranium has a mass 14 times that of Earth
Neptune has a mass 17 times that of Earth
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