What’s the Hottest Object in the Universe?
Postdoctoral Researcher Physics, Duke University and particle physicist at CERN
I think the hottest known objects in the universe are the collision points created by heavy ion collisions like those at RHIC, at Brookhaven on Long Island, and here at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. When we collide heavy ions at about 5 tera electron Volts in the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC is both the coldest extended object in the universe—because the 27-km of magnets used to bend and steer the beam in the LHC tunnel are bathed in liquid helium at 1.9 K, colder than the 2.7 K of outer space—and is simultaneously creating the places, the collision points, with the hottest temperatures in the universe. As with the QGP, deciding when it first becomes a thermalized object depends on the definition of ‘object,’ but even ignoring the very early (and very hot) times that we can really only speculate about, it is easy to get temperatures above 100 trillion trillion degrees.
Source: gizmodo.com