China's E.A.S.T. plasma fusion device -102sec@50milKelvin

[phyllotaxis]

http://english.cas.cn/newsroom/news/201 ... 9588.shtml

Excerpt:

A team of Chinese scientists in Hefei, capital city of east China’s Anhui Province, has made an unprecedented breakthrough on an energy generation device that will make it one step closer to transform energy into stable, sustainable and controllable resources.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun", made a 102-second long pulse plasma discharge at over the central electron temperature of 50 million degrees in Hefei at the end of January, 2016. This is the longest plasma discharge time recorded in all the Tokamak fusion devices in the world.

Led by the Chinese scientists at the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Heifei, the EAST fusion device has made it one step closer to the goal of 1000-second long pulse plasma discharge at over the central electron temperature of 100 million degrees.

[Webbman]

what kind of thermometer could possibly read 50 million K?

[Rushthezeppelin]

what kind of thermometer could possibly read 50 million K?

They are looking at the spectrum produced and using Kirchoff's Law of Thermal Emission to estimate the temp (the same way we say that the corona of the sun is 3.5 million K. Pierre Marie Robitaille has recently been disputing the validity of using this law on gases though. IIRC also you can only use this law on something that is not undergoing conduction or convection. This actually destroys the gaseous sun model if true.

[D_Archer]

what kind of thermometer could possibly read 50 million K?

Also remember that that it is the electron temperature.

Wiki:

"The electron temperature of a plasma can be several orders of magnitude higher than the temperature of the neutral species or of the ions"

Regards,
Daniel