I can get that we may have created something (quark-gluon plasma) at 4 trillion degrees Celsius that is hotter than a supernova, but…
How could we have created the coldest thing ever, at 100pK (less than 1 K), and that there is nothing colder? Might a single atom in deep space not have less energy? Apparently some nebula is the coldest thing out there.
In: Physics
A single atom doesn’t have a temperature. It has a velocity, which depends on your arbitrary reference: You can always define its velocity to be zero.
Temperature only exists as a property for a large set of objects, like a cloud of gas atoms. All of space is filled with some radiation, which is enough to prevent gas clouds or any other system from cooling down below ~2 K. Maybe there is a region that is at 1 K that we haven’t seen yet, but we don’t know how anything could get significantly colder naturally. “observed” means these regions wouldn’t count anyway because we haven’t observed them yet.
Latest Answers