The COLDEST Place in the Universe Is on the Space Station

The coldest known place in the entire universe isn't in deep space. It's on the International Space Station.

Empty space is incredibly cold, sitting near minus 270 degrees Celsius, just a few degrees above absolute zero, the coldest anything can possibly get.

But inside the station, there's a device called the Cold Atom Lab. Using lasers and magnets, it chills tiny clouds of atoms to less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. That is over a billion times colder than the vacuum of space around the station. It only works up there, because the station's weightlessness lets scientists hold these ultra-cold atoms still far longer than gravity ever would on Earth.

At those temperatures, atoms stop behaving like particles and start acting like a single wave of matter, a bizarre state barely possible anywhere else. The coldest spot we know of in all of existence is a small box, orbiting our warm blue planet.

Follow The Cosmic Vault — the universe is stranger than you think.