Starship Asterisk*

Kovil, I know little about the operations of the Z Machine. I study nuclear collisions at RHIC as I mentioned in the first post in this thread. ta152h0 mentions starting a nuclear reaction (well, reaxction :-) ), and I assume he's talking about fission reactions. Fission doesn't require high tempera...

Soenke, I see that the wikipedia entry for the Z Machine lists 2 billion, which is probably where they grabbed that number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine Orin, you asked how we measure something that hot. For us, we have two methods: 1) chemistry and 2) kinetics. They both assume equilibrat...

Regarding: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060313.html The March 13, 2006 APOD caption states, "The plasma reached a temperature in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it the hottest thing ever in the history of the Earth." [edit: I see that the authors have inserted the word "arg...