Slashdot Mirror
Coldest Place in the Universe
Chris Gondek writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on how NASA has released a high-quality image of the coldest place found in the universe. Five thousand light years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus, the nebula, a gas cloud formed from a dying star, has a temperature of minus 272 degrees.
It is only one degree warmer than absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, when atoms cease to vibrate and radiate no heat whatsoever.
This radiation is the remnant of the Big Bang, the explosion which forged the universe in trillion-degree temperatures. More than 11 billion years later, this heat has cooled to minus 270 degrees, but is still detectable."
> Entropy and evolution can never co-exist.
Sure they can. Entropy only applies in a closed system. The earth is continually receiving energy from the sun, hence the earth is not a closed system.
Besides, who's to say God and evolution cannot coexist? What if that's the method He used?
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Yeah, but you try finding a satisfactory explanation of an asymptote to put in an article meant for the general public.
As the article admits at the end, it's only the coldest natural place in the universe. Scientists have produced lower temperatures in the lab, less than a few 100 billionths above absolute zero. Last time I checked, which appears to be later than the journalist who wrote the article, the coldest place in the universe was actually Brighton, England.
EVERYTHING in science is 'just a theory.'
You can't get anything stronger than a theory. Contrary to popular belief, a law isn't a theory that has become ironclad because it can't be disproved - laws are outside the 'speculation-conjecture-hypothesis-theory' hierarchy.
everything is theoretically disprovable. Maybe some day off in the future the theory of neutrons will be replaced by a new one, and neutrons will be viewed as a primitive but workable explanation of a natural phenomenon, the same way Newtonian physics came to be viewed after the advent of relativity.
When was the Big Bang theory proven and the guesstimation of 11 billion years determined to be fact?
When Penzias and Wilson detected the microwave background radiation. Despite Fred Hoyle's best efforts, steady state theory could never convincingly explain the properties of the microwave background, which were precisely as Big Bang theory predicted. As for the 11 billion years, notice that the article actually says 'more than 11 billion years' - 11 billion is the lower end of the scale for age estimates.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Did I miss something in my science class?
The temperature of the microwave background radiation is 3K. This means that unless something is shielding an object (or large gas mass) it will be irradiated (heated) to this temperature. And because of the nature of blackbody radiation - the thing doing the shielding would need to be colder than 3K - else it would be a source of 'hot' radiation itself.
And then how do you take a picture of something that is only 1K? This object would emit less radiation than the 3K background - thus it would be a dark spot. It could reflect light - but not all the light is reflected (or is it due to some cool QM effect that I don't know about)? Anyway the absorbed light from other stars would most likely over years - heat the gas mass to a temperature between the 3K background and temperature of the star surface (5000K). Probably something in the neighborhood of 4K.
Conclusion - unless there is some sort of active cooling, nothing can cool down to less than temperature of the background radiation (3K). Is this an early April fools joke - or state schools worthless?
Free Me! (http://www.freeme.org/)