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The Quest To Make Super-Cold Quantum Blobs in Space (wired.com)
Last January in northern Sweden, a German-led team of physicists loaded a curious machine onto an unmanned rocket. The payload, about as tall as a single-story apartment, was essentially a custom-made freezer -- a vacuum chamber, with a small chip and lasers within, that could cool single atoms near absolute zero.
It may sound like a bizarre experiment, but it is something physicists have been aching to do for years. They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the atmosphere's boundary of outer space, monitoring a livestream from a heated building nearby. Then, just 17 minutes later, they watched as the freezer plummeted back down to Earth, landing via parachute on snowy ground 40 miles from the launch site. Wired elaborates: See, the freezer that the Germans launched has the ability to make atoms clump together in a cloud-like blob called a Bose-Einstein condensate -- a phase of matter that exhibits some truly bizarre properties. It's delicate enough to respond to tiny fluctuations in gravity and electromagnetic fields, which means it could someday make for a super-precise sensor in space. But down on Earth, it tends to collapse in a matter of milliseconds because of gravity. So the blobs had to go to space. Since the late '90s, physicists have been developing machines that can autonomously assemble and control the blobs during spaceflight. With this rocket launch, they've succeeded. The group in Germany, led by physicist Ernst Rasel of University of Hannover, just released pictures of blobs they managed to create [PDF], as well as precise measurements of how they jiggled during their brief trip. "They've essentially laid the groundwork to show that you can actually do this, and it's not totally insane," says physicist Nathan Lundblad of Bates College.
It may sound like a bizarre experiment, but it is something physicists have been aching to do for years. They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the atmosphere's boundary of outer space, monitoring a livestream from a heated building nearby. Then, just 17 minutes later, they watched as the freezer plummeted back down to Earth, landing via parachute on snowy ground 40 miles from the launch site. Wired elaborates: See, the freezer that the Germans launched has the ability to make atoms clump together in a cloud-like blob called a Bose-Einstein condensate -- a phase of matter that exhibits some truly bizarre properties. It's delicate enough to respond to tiny fluctuations in gravity and electromagnetic fields, which means it could someday make for a super-precise sensor in space. But down on Earth, it tends to collapse in a matter of milliseconds because of gravity. So the blobs had to go to space. Since the late '90s, physicists have been developing machines that can autonomously assemble and control the blobs during spaceflight. With this rocket launch, they've succeeded. The group in Germany, led by physicist Ernst Rasel of University of Hannover, just released pictures of blobs they managed to create [PDF], as well as precise measurements of how they jiggled during their brief trip. "They've essentially laid the groundwork to show that you can actually do this, and it's not totally insane," says physicist Nathan Lundblad of Bates College.
For the sake of argument, let's say one could get the temperature down to absolute zero. Let us further assume a single atom is subjected to this temperature.
Would one be able to "freeze" the atom so that its constituent parts would be immobile and visible? Or would it fall apart?
What happens to an atom at absolute zero?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
They're sending Huckabee Sanders into space, wha?
Back in the '50s, I learned that you get rid of the Blob by freezing it!
Now you need the cold to make the Blob????
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
My ex has super cold quantum boobs. Not need to go to space to find them. They are both within reach and unreachable at the same time. Truly quantum! And cold... so cold...
They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the atmosphere's boundary of outer space, monitoring a livestream from a heated building nearby.
How tall was the heated building? (in units of "single-story apartment")
So it's a... Space Quest?
Does anyone know how to contact Roger Wilco?
#DeleteFacebook
The payload, about as tall as a single-story apartment
This is a strange description. What does "apartment" add to it, aside from it being used to flower the descriptions of 3-story things, of which normal homes are usually not.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The brief description is vague about the actual size of the payload, but if it can be sent up as a supply-rocket mission to operate in station with the ISS (not ON the ISS, because of the need for cryogenic conditions and to avoid the possibility of getting their freezer back with nothing in it but a handwritten note saying "Sorry! I got hungry and used Bose-Einstein concentrate on my sorbet - Feodor") for an extended period of time.
Run this way, the experiment would not be bound by the tight time constraint of a suborbital flight, could be serviced in flight as necessary by spacewalks, and returned to earth independently.