Checked reel · 23 Oct 2026
In 2012, physicists at CERN smashed lead ions together in the Large Hadron Collider and briefly reached 5.5 trillion Kelvin (about 10 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). That created a tiny drop of quark-gluon plasma, the same subatomic soup that filled the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. It easily beats the core of our sun (around 15 million degrees Celsius) and supernova explosions (around 100 billion degrees). We also hold the record for the coldest temperature by cooling atoms down to nanokelvins above absolute zero, making Earth home to both extremes.
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