Bubble Surfaces Four Times as Hot as the Sun!

I thought this was infinitely fascinating.

Temperature inside collapsing bubble four times that of sun

Using a technique employed by astronomers to determine stellar surface temperatures, chemists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have measured the temperature inside a single, acoustically driven collapsing bubble.

Their results seem out of this world.

“When bubbles in a liquid get compressed, the insides get hot – very hot,” said Ken Suslick, the Marvin T. Schmidt Professor of Chemistry at Illinois and a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. “Nobody has been able to measure the temperature inside a single collapsing bubble before. The temperature we measured – about 20,000 degrees Kelvin – is four times hotter than the surface of our sun.”

For more information about the physics behind these results, take a look at these Wikipedia entries.

• Wikipedia:Cavitation


• Wikipedia:Sonoluminescence


• Wikipedia:Bubble Fusion

And as a side note, wouldn't it be so much nicer if these blogs were based on Wiki instead? It'd be much nicer to post things. MUCH nicer... But, oh well.