  We show that the nature of the topological fluctuations in $SU(3)$ gauge
theory changes drastically at the finite temperature phase transition. Starting
from temperatures right above the phase transition topological fluctuations
come in well separated lumps of unit charge that form a non-interacting ideal
gas. Our analysis is based on a novel method to count not only the net
topological charge, but also separately the number of positively and negatively
charged lumps in lattice configurations using the spectrum of the overlap Dirac
operator. This enables us to determine the joint distribution of the number of
positively and negatively charged topological objects, and we find this
distribution to be consistent with that of an ideal gas of unit charged
topological objects.
