Correct Option: D

This scorching achievement happened inside the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which is a 2.4-mile (3.9 kilometers) underground track where particles smash into one another under conditions that existed about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The new feat, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., occurred when gold nuclei (the positively charged part of the atom made of protons and neutrons) were sent speeding around RHIC at near light-speed until they crashed into each other. When the ions collide, the enormous energy released is so, intense it melts the neutrons and protons inside the gold nuclei into their constituent parts, namely quarks and gluons. RHIC physicists have measured the temperature of this quark-gluon plasma, finding it reaches around 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees Celsius).