September 12, 2003

There's Nothing Cooler Than This. Nothing.

The coolest thing in the Universe is now a cloud of sodium atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Physicists from the MIT-Harvard Centre for Ultra-Cold atoms have chilled 2500 sodium atoms to within half a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the temperature at which atomic oscillation slows to a standstill.

"Nothing in the Universe that we know of is naturally this cold" says Aaron Leanhardt, who led the research. Even deep space is six billion times hotter.

"The old record for 'lowest manmade temperature' was published in the journal Nature, so hopefully publishing our result in Science will be considered good enough for acceptance as a Guinness world record" he says.

-- As reported in New Scientist

Posted by Van der Leun at September 12, 2003 9:12 PM
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