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The center of such a bubble may be even more astonishingly hot.

The scientists, at the University of Illinois, did not speculate just how hot the bubble became, but said they had managed to create a state of matter called plasma inside the bubble. In it, some of the electrons have been stripped off the atoms.

"This is the first definitive proof of the existence of a plasma" during this kind of bubble implosion, said one of the scientists, Dr. Kenneth S. Suslick, a professor of chemistry at Illinois.

Their finding supports the intriguing notion that it may be possible to compress these bubbles so violently that vapor molecules in them are heated to multimillion-degree temperatures.

The phenomenon of imploding bubbles, called sonoluminence because it emits a flash of light as the bubble collapses, has been increasingly studied since it was discovered 15 years ago.

In 2002, scientists performing an experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee even reported that they had used the technique to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium - the process that powers the sun. That experiment did not measure the bubble temperatures, but detected byproducts of fusion.

The Oak Ridge scientists said each burst produced only a smidgen of energy, but they speculated that it could develop into a practical power source.