What’s The Highest Known Temperature?

In fact, at absolute zero (0 Kelvin, −273°C, or −460°F), all movements from atoms completely stop. You can’t get colder than that. It’s like trying to go south from the South Pole or north from the North Pole; not only won’t it happen, it can’t.

The hottest thing that we know of (and have seen) is actually a lot closer than you might think. It’s right here on Earth at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When they smash gold particles together, for a split second, the temperature reaches 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hotter than a supernova explosion.

Theoretically, yes. The first contender for the hottest temperature is the Planck Temperature, which equals 100 million million million million million degrees, or 1032 K. You just can’t put this kind of temperature into perspective. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around this number. Saying that 1032 K is hot is like saying that the universe takes up some space.

This is as hot as you can get in normal physics because, once it gets any hotter, conventional physics just doesn’t work. Weird things happen. Gravitational force becomes as strong as the three other natural forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces), and they merge together into one unified force. Understanding how this happens is referred to as the “theory of everything”—the holy grail of modern theoretical physics…something that we currently don’t understand.