NASA announced its plan to create the coldest place in the known Universe inside the International Space Station as part of a study on quantum physics, RT News reported Monday.
Temperatures in the Cold Atom Laboratory, or "the coolest spot in the universe," will be near absolute zero, allowing scientists to study its impact on matter. The laboratory is expected to be ready for installation by December 2015.
"We're going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally," Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Rob Thompson, the project's lead scientist, said, according to NASA Science. "We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin."
One hundred pico-Kelvin lies one ten billionth of a degree higher than absolute zero. Absolute zero, or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, is the lowest temperature possible and where no heat is left in any substance. The normal function of solids, liquids and gases no longer applies, according to NASA Science. New, quantum forms of matter are created when atoms interact at temperatures just above absolute zero.
Quantum physics studies the abnormal behavior of light and matter on atomic scales. On that scale, matter acts as both particles and waves, and can be in two places at the same time, according to NASA Science.
"We'll be able to assemble atomic wave packets as wide as a human hair- that is, big enough for he human eye to see," Thompson said.
Studies in the laboratory, which will last for five years, will be done in space because scientists are unable to create such frigid conditions on Earth. When gas expands, it cools. The gases scientists will study will expand and cool at a much faster rate without gravity pulling the atoms down.
If they succeed in making temperatures cold enough, scientists do not know what they will come up with, Thompson said, according to NASA Sciences.
"We're entering the unknown," Thompson said.
