NASA to create coldest spot in the universe on the International Space Station

With its awesome views of the Earth and space, and all the great science being conducted there, the International Space Station is just about the coolest place we know of, but NASA is aiming to make it even cooler. They're going to install a small atomic refrigerator on the station in 2016 that will produce the coldest spot in the known universe.

Nature may make things pretty cold here on Earth, with the coldest temperatures we've ever recorded getting down into the -90s Celsius. However, compared to how cold things can actually get in this universe, that's nothing. Temperatures in the space between galaxies can get down to -269°C, which is just four degrees above the coldest temperature anything can reach — zero degrees on the Kelvin scale of temperature, or 'absolute zero.' It's not easy to get things to be that cold, but the scientists working with NASA's Cold Atom Lab are going to get very, very close.

"We’re going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally," Rob Thompson, the project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin."

For anyone who hasn't been keeping up with extreme number prefixes, 'pico' stands for one-trillionth. So Thompson and his team are looking to chill these atoms down to one-ten-billionth of a degree Kelvin, or 0.0000000001 K. That's not a record low (MIT scientists got sodium gas down to less than 100th of that back in 2003), but they're not looking to set a record here. They just want to test the limits of matter at these extremes and discover what kind of practical applications we can get out of the results.

Science@NASA put together a short video to describe what they're up to, how they plan on doing it, and what use it might have for us in the future:

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Whenever you get into these kinds of extremes, things get very weird. When you delve down to the scale of atoms, the 'normal' laws of physics that generally make sense to us fall away and the 'weird' laws of quantum mechanics take over. This is not something we can see with our own eyes, though. However, by pushing atoms this close to absolute zero temperature, the lab will be able to produce Bose-Einstein condensates, which are capable of showing off the laws of quantum mechanics at much larger scales — even visible to the naked eye!

What's great about this research is that it's showing off yet another benefit to having the International Space Station in orbit. The station's zero-g environment allows scientists to perform experiments that would be impossible or just incredibly difficult, here on Earth. The research benefits the future of human space exploration, but many experiments will benefit us here on Earth as well, with advances in knowledge, technology and even medicine. The station's mission recently received an extension to 2024, but with these kinds of studies, here's hoping that it continues to operate even longer.

(Image and video courtesy: Science@NASA)

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