Encyclopedia > Coldest temperature achieved on earth
Antarctica is the coldest place on earth. The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was −89.4 C (−129F) recorded in 1983 at the Russian Base Vostok in Antarctica. This is still greater than the minimum temperatures achieved in cryogenic labs. Cryogenics is the study of very low temperatures or the production of the same, and is often confused with cryobiology, the study of the effect of low temperatures on organisms, or the study of cryopreservation. ...
In 1904 Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes created a special lab in Leiden to get to lower temperatures than anyone had done before. In 1908 he managed to lower the temperature to less than one degree above absolute zero, which is −273.15° degrees below the freezing point of water. Only in this exceptional cold will helium turn into a liquid (at −269 C). Onnes achieved this feat first. He received a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (September 21, 1853 – February 21, 1926) was a Dutch physicist. ... Leiden (in English also, but now rarely, Leyden) is a city and municipality in South Holland, The Netherlands. ... Temperature is the physical property of a system which underlies the common notions of hot and cold; the material with the higher temperature is said to be hotter. ... Absolute zero is the highest temperature that can be obtained in any macroscopic system. ... General Name, Symbol, Number Helium, He, 2 Atomic mass 4. ... Photographs of Nobel Prize Medals. ...
Modern experimenters achieve temperatures measured in hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
See also timeline of low-temperature technology. Timeline of low-temperature technology 1877 - Raoul Pictet and Louis Paul Cailletet liquefy oxygen 1883 - Z.F. Wroblewski condenses experimentally useful quantities of liquid oxygen 1892 - James Dewar invents the vacuum-insulated, silver-plated glass Dewar flask 1895 - Carl von Linde files for patent protection of his process for liquefaction...
The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was −89.4 °C recorded in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica.
This is still higher than the lowest temperaturesachieved in cryogenic labs.
Moving away from the earth, the coldesttemperature found in nature is the Boomerang Nebula, at about one kelvin, which is cooler than the cosmic microwave background radiation.
While temperature is a measure of the heat of an object, heat itself is simply a highly abstract consideration of the kinetic energy of the molecular particles of the object.
For the case of free atoms at temperatures approaching absolute zero, most of the energy is in the form of translational motion and the temperature can be measured in terms of the speed of this motion, with slower speeds corresponding to lower temperatures.
It can be shown from the laws of thermodynamics that the temperature can never be exactly absolute zero; this is the same principle that ensures no system may be 100% efficient, although it is possible to achievetemperatures arbitrarily close to it.
Feeds |
Contact