Did you know that the coldest place in the entire universe isn't in outer space, but once existed on Earth? Yes, you read that right! This place once existed on Earth. And it was humans who created it.
Where exactly is that? The answer is Wolfgang Ketterle's laboratory at MIT, Cambridge.
How cold is it there?
In this laboratory, the artificial temperature ever achieved was −273.15°C (500 picokelvin).
And did you know? This is the coldest temperature ever recorded, even breaking a Guinness World Record!
To give you an idea of how cold this is, let's look at temperatures elsewhere in the universe:
- The coldest temperature in outer space is about −272°C.
- The coldest temperature on the Moon is about −170.6°C.
- The coldest temperature on Mars is about −153°C.
- The coldest temperature in Antarctica is around -98°C
How did Ketterle achieve these extreme temperatures? It all started when he was trying to create something called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). These condensates form when a group of atoms enter the same quantum state and behave uniformly. Neutrinos at this temperature travel at nearly 300 m/s, or more than 20 times faster than Usain Bolt at his top speed.
Because of his early achievements and fundamental studies of these condensates, Ketterle was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001