ABSOLUTE ZERO / HOT

 

ABSOLUTE ZERO

Pretty darn close, but it will be impossible to ever reach it.

Absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature in the universe. It's defined as zero kelvin, or -273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.

At this point, atoms and molecules have no kinetic energy, meaning they can't vibrate or move around.

They're basically frozen in place.

But here's the thing: absolute zero is impossible to reach in practice.

Why?

Because of the laws of thermodynamics, that's why.

• The first law says that energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed.
• The second law says that entropy, or disorder, always increases in an isolated (closed) system.
• The third law says that entropy approaches a constant value as temperature approaches absolute zero.

If we cool something down to absolute zero, we need to remove all the heat from it.

But heat is a form of energy, and you can't get rid of it completely. You can only transfer it somewhere else. And as you do that, you increase the entropy of the system, making it harder to reach the lowest possible entropy state.

Quantum physics also throws a wrench in the works.

You see, at very low temperatures, matter behaves in weird ways. It can exist in superposition, meaning it can be in two or more states at once.

It can also entangle with other particles, meaning they share information and properties across space and time.

These phenomena are called quantum effects, and they prevent matter from reaching a definite state at absolute zero.

So like I said earlier scientist have came close.

The current record holder is a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard who cooled a cloud of sodium atoms to 500 nanokelvin in 2023 .

That's 0.0000005 kelvin, or -273.1499995 degrees Celsius, or -459.6699991 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than outer space.

But even at this ultra-low temperature, the atoms were still moving and interacting with each other through quantum effects.

They formed a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where they acted like one giant super-atom with weird properties.

So they were not really at absolute zero, just very close to it.

THE HIGHEST TEMPERATURE EVER RECORDED IN THE UNIVERSE

 

The highest temperature ever recorded in the universe was achieved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The LHC experiment created a temperature of 9.9 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than 366,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.

The Brookhaven experiment created a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius, which is about 250,000 times hotter than the Sun's core.

Both experiments aimed to recreate the primordial state of matter called quark–gluon plasma.

What the heck is quark–gluon plasma, you ask?

Well, it's basically the stuff that existed right after the Big Bang, when the universe was so hot and dense that even atoms couldn't form.

Quarks and gluons are the tiny particles that make up protons and neutrons, which in turn make up atoms.

In normal conditions, quarks and gluons are bound together by a strong force, but in quark–gluon plasma, they are free to roam around like a hot mess.

The quark–gluon plasma can help us understand how the universe evolved from its initial state to what we see today.

It can also help us test some of the fundamental theories of physics, such as quantum chromodynamics and general relativity.

Now, you need a lot of energy and a lot of gold to make the quark–gluon plasma.

Yes, gold.

You see, gold atoms have a lot of protons and neutrons in their nuclei, which means a lot of quarks and gluons to work with.

You also need a giant machine like the LHC or the RHIC (that's short for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) to smash those gold atoms together at near-light speed.

When that happens, a tiny fireball is created that lasts for a fraction of a second and reaches temperatures hotter than anything else in the universe.

The fireballs are so small and short-lived that they don't affect anything else around them.

They also don't create any new elements or radiation that could harm us or the environment.

They just give us a glimpse into the past and the future of our amazing universe.