When was the lowest temperature recorded

Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and Nasa's former chief scientist, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn't been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn't know.

This article is more than 7 years old. The reading won't be featured in the Guinness Book of World Records because it was satellite measured. Nasa satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded in east Antarctica. Researchers from four universities in Germany have created the coldest temperature ever recorded in a lab—38 trillionths of a degree warmer than absolute zero to be exact, according to their new work, recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The bone-chilling temperature only persisted for a few seconds at the University of Bremen's Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity, but the breakthrough could have longstanding ramifications for our understanding of quantum mechanics.

That's because the closer we get to absolute zero—the lowest possible temperature that we could ever theoretically reach, as outlined by the laws of thermodynamics —the more peculiarly particles, and therefore substances, act. Liquid helium, for instance, becomes a "superfluid" at significantly low temperatures, meaning that it flows without any resistance from friction. Nitrogen freezes at degrees Celsius. At cool enough temperatures, some particles even take on wave-like characteristics.

This is the point at which "the fundamental particles of nature have minimal vibrational motion," according to ScienceDaily. However, it's impossible for scientists to create absolute zero conditions in the lab. In this case, the researchers were studying wave properties of atoms when they came up with a process that could lower a system's temperature by slowing particles to virtually a total standstill.

For several seconds, the particles held completely still, and the temperature lowered to an astonishing 38 picokelvins, or 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. This temperature is so low that it's not even detectable with a regular thermometer of any kind.

So the team took their setup to the European Space Agency's Bremen drop tower, a microgravity research center at the University of Bremen in Germany. By dropping the vacuum chamber into a free fall while switching the magnetic field on and off rapidly, allowing the BEC to float uninhibited by gravity, they slowed the rubidium atoms' molecular motion to almost nothing. The resulting BEC stayed at 38 picokelvins - 38 trillionths of a Kelvin - for about 2 seconds, setting "an absolute minus record", the team reported Aug.

The coldest known natural place in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula , which lies in the Centaurus constellation, about 5, light years from Earth.

The researchers of the new study said in a statement that, theoretically, they could sustain this temperature for as long as 17 seconds under truly weightless conditions, like in space. Ultra cold temperatures may one day help scientists build better quantum computers, according to researchers at MIT.

Joanna Thompson is an intern for Live Science with a deep love for nature.