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Chinese scientists chill atoms to record low on Tiangong space station (www.scmp.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [B] to c/china@news.abolish.capital
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Chinese scientists have chilled atoms aboard the Tiangong space station to the lowest temperature ever measured, smashing US and German records and paving the way for ultra-precise space sensors that could find hidden minerals, track climate change and test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Researchers from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences brought thousands of rubidium atoms, packed into a cloud smaller than a grain of sand, to less than 10 trillionths of a degree above absolute...

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[–] 8 points 1 day ago (1 child)

"Tiangong Station, this is Earth, what are you doing up there?"

"We're just chilling with our atoms here"

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    • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Does anyone know if doing this in space is because we want ultra-cold materials in space or because space provides some advantage in making matter ultra-cold?

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    One obvious advantage is that the ambient environment is already cold. Also, there are reasons to want ultra-cold materials in space. For example, the substrate used to do quantum computing needs to stay ultra-cold, so putting quantum computers in space makes sense. https://www.uni.lu/snt-en/news/how-quantum-computing-is-transforming-space-research/

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  • [–] 3 points 5 hours ago

    It's true that you can in a sense say that space is absurdly cold, like near absolute zero if I remember right, but it doesn't really help because there's nearly nothing in the vacuum of space to shed heat to. That was a huge criticism of recent suggestions to put data centers in space. As far as I can tell, the article doesn't even say anything about putting quantum computers in space. I think they're planning to use them to optimize some satellite problems.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 hours ago

    Shedding heat in space is hard since you transfer most heat by direct contact and space is super empty, so more likely the former than the latter. Or could be just for the flex of it, I guess, prove it's possible because it's hard.

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