system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
People built a "Z machine" on Earth that creates a temperature of 2 Billion Kelvin. How can this temperature be generated and why does this temperature not melt the entire facility that creates it?

For scale, this is approximately 100x hotter than the center of the sun.

Given that the sun only has an outside temperature of 5,500K and easily heats up Earth to 300K+ over a distance of 150 million kilometers, shouldn't a temperature of 2,000,000,000K on Earth itself cause severe damage of some kind?
gpt
It's a VERY tiny amount of matter heated to that extreme. It's a point temperature, they aren't making the whole earth 2B Kelvin.

Think of it like a welding torch. The spot of the weld is hit enough to melt the metal, but the rest of the object being welded stays solid.