Chinese scientists have chilled atoms aboard the Tiangong space station to the lowest temperature ever measured, smashing US and German records and paving the way for ultra-precise space sensors that could find hidden minerals, track climate change and test Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Researchers from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences brought thousands of rubidium atoms, packed into a cloud smaller than a grain of sand, to less than 10 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. The results were published in the journal Science on Friday.
That is about four times colder than the previous best, set in a German drop tower, and colder than anything reached by Nasa’s Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station (ISS). The cloud held together for seven seconds, much longer than the two seconds achieved in the drop tower and about one second aboard the ISS.