NASA Wants to Create the Coldest Spot in the Known Universe

By: By Laura Dattaro

Published: February 5,2014

 

 

 

 

 

“Freezing cold” doesn’t begin to describe what the temperatures will be like inside NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, designed to be the coldest spot in the entire known universe.
That’s colder than 454 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the temperature of matter floating in the vacuum of space far away from galaxies. It’s so cold that the idea of freezing — or even of solid, liquid and gas — is no longer relevant, so cold that matter reaches new states of being that make no sense in the context of the world in which humans live.

NASA's Cold Atom Lab will help researchers understand the world of atoms and particles. (NASA/JPL)

The Cold Atom Lab is designed to study an entirely different world, the quantum world, the world where particles can be in two places at once and jump in and out of existence at a whim. The lab will function like an “atomic ‘refrigerator,’” as a NASA release highlighting a new video about the mission puts it, and will achieve a temperature only one ten-billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which all motion, even that of an atom, ceases.
As if the idea of studying the quantum world at a nearly impossible temperature isn’t complex enough, the experiment will happen in space, on board the International Space Station. The absence of gravity weighing down the atoms makes it possible to cool gases more than would be possible on Earth, the release explains, capitalizing on the principle that gases cool as they expand.
The lab is currently scheduled to launch to the ISS in 2016, where it will work for at least one year and up to six. One of the more intriguing possibilities of the lab is to create atomic structures as wide as a human hair — “that is, big enough for the human eye to see,” Rob Thompson, project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab, said in the release. That means, for the first time, a quantum object will exist in our macro world.
“We’re entering the unknown,” Thompson said.
MORE: Breathtaking Photos of the Coldest City in the World

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A petrol station and christmas tree on the road to Oymyakon. Cars must be run continuously when making the journey to Oymyakon; 24 hour petrol stations are essential to winter transport. (Amos Chapple)