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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."
Almost as cold as Hillary Rosen's heart 8^)
I could cool my Jolt with that one :)
See my blog for my free opinions.
You mean it's *not* my ex-girlfriend's soul?
My bosses office at pay review time...
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
As it turns out, absolute zero is not the "coldest possible temperature". It is impossible to attain absolute zero, as a little basic quantum mechanics tells us. Particles will ALWAYS retain some amount of energy, the "Zero Point Energy", which cannot be removed. More accurately, we can say that absolute zero is the lower bound on the range of possible temperatures - but is not included.
Most frigid place in the universe? They've already shown Janeway's quarters.
Ba-dum-ch-OW! That hurt!
> 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
her tit?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
It was called the Boomerang nebula because it was first observed with a much lower resolution telescope in which it really did look like a boomerang.
temperature is defined by the movement of atoms, right? how can microwave radiation have temperature?
if i got my physics right, radiation just induces movement of atoms... ?-)
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
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.
"Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!"
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Ahh posting to slashdot on his 21st birthday and getting FP. A true geek. I salute you.
Why not fork?
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.
Sometimes its fun to go sacred cow tipping.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
... and all of a sudden, 1000 Overclockers wonder, "How do I get my Athlon to Centaurus?"
Funny, I've always thought going from -272 degrees to -270 degress is called heating.
That was referring to the background radiation of the Universe, which has cooled over time since the Big Bang. The astonishing thing is that the nebula is colder still.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The lowest level of energy ("fundamental" energy level of a quantum system), which we can equate to absolute zero, because there is no allowed state with less energy *does* have energy, including vibrational energy. Atoms *cannot* "cease" to vibrate, because by doing so they would violate Heisenberg's indetermination principle (they would have an exactly determinate position _and_ moment).
:)
I hope someone corrects me if I am wrong
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
From the article:
So it was done with a radio telescope, possibly SEST, by looking at molecular lines from CO. It sounds like they found that the CO was absorbing some of the background radiation. So it wasn't "seen" with a telescope in the way that you're thinking.
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
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/)
In 1995, American researchers cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
I know a girl like that....
Get your own free personal location tracker
It just seems likely to me that there's someplace out in the black which doesn't even have enough matter for heat to exist. That would be colder.
Are we that desperate for the ultimate cooling method for our computers that we need NASA to find somewhere that freaking cold? ;)
Call your local quantum mechanic. She'll tell you they don't cease to "vibrate": it's called zero point energy.
People who don't read the article (and let's face it, that's most of us, right?), are certain to be confused by the quoted text. The submitter apparently left out this important sentence:
The microwave background radiation is "this radiation" the next sentence refers to.
This nebula is weird because it's _colder_ than the ambient background temperature of the universe; some process must be going on to cool it, apparently the rapid expansion of the gas.
Ultimately, yes, the Universe seems doomed to cool down indefinitely. The Universe is expanding, and it seems that it isn't going to stop; the galaxies end up spread out much further, the background radiation redshifts further and further down into radio noise, the stars start dying off... The future is a cold, cold place. No energy is destroyed, it's just spread out thinner and thinner over time.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Your average Bose Einstein condensate, made in a lab of your choice, is somewhere between one billionth and one millionth kelvin above absolute zero. So the coldest place in the universe is probably in those labs.
-- Please put this in your sig if you think
"One can say the Boomerang acts as a refrigerator,"
So you can see it because someone left the door open?
Ex-wives have souls... It's part of the divorce agreement.
I should have sold my soul to the devil instead - at least he's honest.
If the entire universe will enventually reach this state .... does this mean hell is finally going to freeze over?
Some have been disussing a way to reach absolute zero. While I am not a physics major, I do love reading Hawking, Barbour, et. al. It's very mind expanding. I've ultimately decided you can not reach absolute zero wihtout cirumventing the laws of the universe and the means that we observe them... as we know it.
...
Okay, so I got thinking... if the space you're measuring was contained by a magnetic field and contained nothing, could it reach absolute zero? Theoretically I would think so. But there's 2 problems with this, right?
The first is simply the observation of "nothing." If I'm not mistaken, you can not measure or observe "nothing" because if it could be observed in any way, it would be "something". Even if you could somehow detect the abscense of "something" you'd be effecting "nothing" and making it into "something." Correct?
The second would be how do we define "nothing?" If I am to define it as something that does not contain matter in any form, then how do I contain it? Is it a matter of containment, or a matter of exclusion? If I am to exclude "something", philosphically this is far different from containing "nothing."
Anyway, I've got a headache now and it's 10 AM EST. Thank you slashdot for another wonderful morning
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
"Man has produced yet chillier temperatures. In 1995, American researchers cooled rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero."
We're so cool!
Love,
Mom
That theory was disproved long ago.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
For those who are interested, the "high" quality image of the nebula can be found here at the Astronomy Picture of the Day for Tues. 2/20/03.
Click on the image and you'll get the enlarged verson.
Sorry, but negative temperatures are ABOVE absolute zero (and above all positive temperatures) in the temperature scale. +infinity and -infinity are the same temperature, but -0 and +0 are not the same temperature.
. -1 00K..-0
from cold to hot:
0K...100K..1000K..+infinity/-infinity..-1000K..
How can we be sure? A negative temperature system will transfer heat energy to a postive temperature system when the two systems are in thermal contact. Heat flows from hot objects to cold objects, so negative temperatures are hotter.
To summarize the link you provided, negative temperatures only can be realized in systems which have an upper bound to their energy. In practice, this means that one is looking at a restricted set of degrees of freedom of a larger system as a system in isolation from the larger system. For instance, consider just the spins of atoms or nuclei, as separate from the spins+kinetic energy of the atoms or nuclei. As the spins of nuclei are often weakly coupled to the kinetic energy (i.e. collisions or atomic vibrations do not easily flip nuclear spins), this is a good approximation. In reality, if you put the spins into a negative temperature state, the energy of the spins will eventually dissipate, cooling the spins, while slightly increasing the kinetic energy in the system.
(The mathematical reason for this is that temperature is actually the reciprocal of a microscopically meaningful property.)
How many times are you going to repost the same link to the same flawed theory?
http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/p1more.html: //fangio.magnet.fsu.edu/~vlad/pr100/100yrs/ht ml/chap/fs2_13054.htm (link to pdf on page)n egkelvi n/negkelvin.htmlr eates/1989/ramsey- autobio.html
Once. And please tell me how it is flawed. Negative absolute temperature was first rigorously described in 1956, and has been the subject of a lot of confirmed research since. The author of this first article was Norman Ramsey who later won a Nobel Prize for the invention of the MASER, the predecessor of the LASER. Som have called the MASER the modt important invention of the 20th Century. Ramsey is also famous for seminal work in NMR chemical shifts, etc.
Here are some DIFFERENT links on the same topic:
http://boojum.hut.fi/~pjh/nuclearmagnetism.htm
http
http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/art/esa/
http://www.nobel.se/physics/lau
The coldest place in the universe is in 2001 Nobel Prize winner Carl Weinman's Lab in Boulder, Colorado. Temperatures as low as 3nK (3 billionths of a Kelvin) have been achieved.