[ad_1]
There was a time when physics experiments could be carried out with two ballast balls and a tower in Pisa (although Galileo's famous experiment is probably apocryphal). Nowadays, scientists need a rocket, a special Rubidium isotope, lasers and a few minutes of free fall in weightlessness to carry out their experiments. At least, that's what you need to create a Bose-Einstein condensate in space.
Bose-Einstein condensate is probably the most exotic state of matter discovered by scientists and it's very, very very difficult to produce. At its heart, a BEC is a set of atoms whose temperature has been lowered to an almost absolute zero. From there, atoms begin to condense into a unified structure, which acts as if it were a single atom. One of the potential applications for BEC is the creation of a sensor capable of capturing gravitational waves, but scientists still need to conduct experiments to fully understand what they are capable of.
The only problem is that Bose-Einstein condensates do not like gravity.
Under normal conditions, a BEC can be efficiently studied only when it is in free fall from a tower, but this gives scientists a window of a few fractions of a second. This prompted scientists to try to create a BEC while it was in free fall, which would allow them to do a lot more research at one go. According to Phys.org:
"The device consisted of a capsule containing a chip containing a group of rubidium-87 atoms, electronics, lasers and a power source. It was activated when the rocket reached an altitude of 243 km, producing a BEC in just 1.6 seconds. Once the BEC produced, 110 pre-programmed experiments were made within six minutes of the return of the rocket to Earth. "
To be clear, a Bose-Einstein condensate is very different from a Higgs-Boson particle (the odd little piece of matter that the large hadron collider is trying to study). The main difference is that experiments on a CEB are not likely to turn the Earth into a hyper-dense sphere the size of a football field.
Source link
