Generated on the space station the fifth state of matter

almost 4 years ago (Edited)

When we went to school, we were taught that matter could be presented in three easily recognizable states, namely: solid, liquid and gaseous, always using water as an example because of how easy it is to see it in all three states.

As we advanced in the educational scale, the fourth state, plasma, was introduced to us, which becomes a sooo hot gas from which stars are formed.

Plasma was discovered by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1932) and it is a strongly ionized gas that, curiously, despite being quite unknown, is the most abundant state of matter in the visible universe.

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In 1920 Nath Bose and Albert Einstein defined a fifth state of matter to be called: "Bose-Einstein condensate" and what is produced, on the contrary, when cooling certain types of gases to temperatures close to absolute 0, that is to say , -273.15 ºC.

Since the temperature comes from the energy of the moving molecules, if we cool them down enough these molecules will move more and more slowly, until they stay in a tight or minimal state of energy, which is called the ground state.

In this state we can say that the condensate acquires quantum properties and behaves as if it were a single giant atom, said this in a very crude way because I do not know as much physics.

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Achieving this state of matter in the laboratories on earth is made very difficult due to gravity and for this reason the laboratory has been transferred to the International Space Station (ISS) and it has been possible to produce the Bose-Einstein condensate in it, using Rubidium atoms.

This experiment, in addition to being a technological milestone, can help to understand the behavior of quantum gases and apart from better understanding the physics sure that they find some use in quantum computing or something like that.

If you want more information:
https://www.livescience.com/fifth-state-of-matter-created-space-station.html