Nasa is attempting to create the coldest place in the universe to help discover more about how atoms behave in space.
The set-up would chill a small area to just a billionth of a degree warmer than absolute zero, which is a pretty chilly -273°C. The ice-box sized mini lab will be sent up to the International Space Station to prevent Earth’s gravity interfering with its experiments.
It’s going there in August on board another one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets.
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Inside the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), as it’s called, lasers in a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic knife will slow down gas particles until they don’t have the energy to move.
There, the atoms can be studied at temperatures a million times colder than the outer space around them.
Atoms at extremely low temperature are of huge interest to scientists because they behave in a totally different way in this state. The normal rules of physics won’t apply anymore – particles will start acting more like waves.
Once chilled, they will reach a state called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This makes them act like superfluids – where particles seem fluid but aren’t slowed down by friction. So if you were to spin superfluid water round in a glass, it would never stop spinning.
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There are five teams back on Earth who will use the CAL for experiments. One is Nobel Prize winner Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado, who created the first Bose-Einstein condensate on Earth, for just a fraction of a second.
In space, it could be seen for as long as several seconds.
Kamal Oudrhiri, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that developed CAL, says work in the fancy freezer box could also give scientists an insight into dark energy, a substance we still know little about despite the fact that it probably makes up most of the universe.
“We are still blind to 95% of the universe,” Oudrhiri said. “Like a new lens in Galileo’s first telescope, the ultra-sensitive cold atoms in the Cold Atom Lab have the potential to unlock many mysteries beyond the frontiers of known physics.”
