PTI, Washington :
NASA is planning to send an ice chest-sized box to the International Space Station (ISS), where it will freeze gas atoms to create the coolest spot in the universe, an advance that may provide new insights into gravity and dark matter.
Inside that box, lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic “knife” will be used to cancel out the energy of gas particles, slowing them until they’re almost motionless.
The suite of instruments, developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). It is set to ride to space in August aboard the SpaceX CRS-12.
CAL’s instruments are designed to freeze gas atoms to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero – more than 100 million times colder than the depths of space.
“Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity,” said CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL.
“The experiments we’ll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy – some of the most pervasive forces in the universe,” said Thompson.
When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
