The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory doesn't have anywhere near the name recognition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. But for the time being, it can lay claim to its own impressive achievement: it's just been recognized by Guinness World Records for achieving the "Highest Manmade Temperature." Go, RHIC!

The honor comes courtesy of the PHENIX collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth.

In those first fractions of a second, the universe was so hot that no nuclei could exist. Instead, there was the QGP, made of quarks and gluons (the massless particles that "carry" the force between quarks). But making this exotic plasma in a laboratory requires enormous energies.

That's where RHIC comes in. In RHIC's 2.4-mile-long ring, gold ions whip around the ring in both directions at once, further accelerated by strategically placed coils of wire that emit radiofrequency radiation. There are six different sites around the ring where collisions can occur.

When those gold nuclei collide head-on, a hot, dense plasma of quarks and gluons forms -- or, more accurately, something akin to a near-frictionless liquid (a very surprising result, needless to say).