Scientists Got A Tiny Mechanical Drum Colder Than They Thought Possible

Excited for the August 21 eclipse? Visit our Eclipse 2017 page to explore the science, history, and myths of the event. The Curiosity team will be viewing the eclipse alongside NASA in Carbondale, Illinois. Follow us on Facebook for live videos, trivia, and interviews on the big day.

Try to remember the coldest thing you've ever felt. An ice-cream-induced brain freeze? Sub-zero temps during a Chicago winter? You couldn't come close to comparing that experience to the frigid temperatures allowed by physics. In January 2017, a team of scientists announced they have cooled a mechanical object to a temperature colder than thought possible.

A Really Cool Drum—Literally

Sorry, physics, we're not playing by your rules today. A team of scientists from National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado achieved the unachievable by cooling a mechanical drum "beyond the quantum backaction limit." Just how cold? We're talkin' 360 microKelvin—which is 10,000 times colder than the vacuum of space. They did it using squeezed light, which is not a new technique, but it had not yet been used for cooling (Gizmodo has a good explanation of how it works here.)

Besides just being really freaking cool (no pun intended), this finding has some practical applications. Because supercooled systems like this drum register virtually no random noise from the surrounding environment, they may give extra precision as force or acceleration sensors. "In the near term, it's about achieving the highest sensitivities that nature allows," John Teufel of NIST told New Scientist. "But further into the future, this sort of cooling may help us revolutionise quantum computing and probe the nature of the quantum world."

It Gets Colder

It's important to note that the mechanical drum the NIST cooled in this experiment is not the coldest thing ever—it's just the coldest mechanical object. As The Washington Post reports, using squeezed light to cool mechanical objects "opens the door to building instruments of unprecedented sensitivity, and to understanding quantum mechanics — one of physics's most mysterious branches — better than ever before."

As for the coldest thing ever? The Bose-Einstein condensate takes the cake. As described by LiveScience, this mysterious fifth state of matter is "a group of atoms cooled to within a hair of absolute zero."

Is there something you're curious about? Email us at editors (at) curiosity.com. And follow Curiosity on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Watch And Learn: Our Favorite Videos About The Cold

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

This video gives a great explanation of the coldest stuff ever.

Share the knowledge!

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

Quantum Blackboard – Quantum Blackboard

The Boomerang Nebula Is The Coldest Place In The Known Universe

(Psst, the mechanical drum from the January 2017 study is colder.)

You might imagine that the coldest place in the universe would be deep in the recesses of space, far away from the warming rays of a star. On the contrary, it turns out that the coldest place in the universe is directly surrounding a star, albeit a dying one. The Boomerang Nebula is a cloud of gas that's being shed by a small dying star on its way to becoming a red giant. The nebula is expanding at an incredible rate, expelling gas at about 102 miles (164 km) per second. That's why it's so cold: as gas expands, its temperature drops. So why is the nebula shaped like a boomerang? It's not, actually. The first astronomers to spot it with a ground-based telescope in 1980 noticed it had a lopsided shape, and perhaps because they were Australian, a boomerang was the first thing that came to mind. Later, in the late 1990s, researchers took a higher-resolution glance with the Hubble Space Telescope and saw that it actually had a double-lobe structure, kind of like a bow-tie. Finally, in 2013, astronomers took an even closer look and found that it's just a round cloud of gas. A ring of dust had been blocking some of its light, making it look like a bow-tie.

Find out why it's so cold

Oymyakon Is The Coldest Inhabited Place On Earth

And you thought you had it bad in the winter?

Oymyakon has a population of around 500 people, all of whom must contend with below-freezing temperatures for at least half of the year. In fact, the town has never recorded a temperature above freezing between October 25 and March 17. The extreme cold demands that residents leave their cars idling when not in use, and renders the ground useless for growing crops. The people who live there rely on meat for most of their diet, including snacks of horse or reindeer blood frozen into cubes.

Find out how the residents cope with the cold

If you liked this you'll love our podcast! Check it out on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, search 'curiosity' on your favorite podcast app or add the RSS Feed URL.

Download the free app

Get the Curiosity Smart Tab

Scientists Got A Tiny Mechanical Drum Colder Than They Thought Possible

A Really Cool Drum—Literally

It Gets Colder

Watch And Learn: Our Favorite Videos About The Cold

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

Share the knowledge!

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

The Boomerang Nebula Is The Coldest Place In The Known Universe

Find out why it's so cold arrow_forward

Oymyakon Is The Coldest Inhabited Place On Earth

Find out how the residents cope with the cold arrow_forward

What People Are Sharing

Tags

What People Are Sharing

Find out why it's so cold

Find out how the residents cope with the cold