China's space station experiment creates coldest temperature ever recorded

A report in Science described a space experiment on China's Tiangong space station that created what is described as the coldest temperature ever achieved: a Bose-Einstein condensate at roughly 9.7 picokelvins, less than ten-trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. Microgravity lets atom clouds expand and be held longer, allowing colder temperatures than are possible on Earth. Such ultracold matter is used to test fundamental physics and build extremely precise sensors and clocks. The publication date of the report is not confirmed as 7 November.