Moon Craters Could Be Coldest Place in Solar System

By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 18 September 2009
01:12 pm ET

The coldest place in the solar system might be closer to home than we thought.

New data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggests that permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole might be colder even than Pluto and the other objects in the solar system's furthest most reaches.

In its first set of measurements, announced Thursday, LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which is conducting the first global survey of the temperature of the lunar surface, found that craters along the lunar south pole that have areas permanently shielded from the sun's light (and suspected to harbor deposits of water ice) have extremely cold temperatures.

"Diviner has recorded minimum daytime brightness temperatures in portions of these craters of less than -397 degrees Fahrenheit," said David Paige, Diviner's principal investigator and a UCLA professor of planetary science. "These super-cold brightness temperatures are, to our knowledge, among the lowest that have been measured anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of Pluto."

more:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090918-cold-moon.html

To study Bose-Einstein condensates.

:D :O

:applause:

That's WAAY hotter than a BEC.

If you visit a lab where they make BECs you'll find no cryogenics whatsoever (at least not associated with forming the BEC; maybe someone might be using a chilled photodetector or doing a measurement that calls for suppression of blackbody radiation. The temperature of the condensate is achieved by optical and magnetic interactions that cool only the ensemble of atoms in the vacuum chamber; everything else sits happily at room temperature!

More useful than the cold would be the lunar vacuum, which appears to be low enough - absent contamination - to serve as a suitable environment for such experiments. But we can already create perfectly suitable vacuum environments in earthbound labs.

You could outfit every person on the planet interested in doing BEC experiments with state-of-the-art labs many times over for a fraction of the cost of setting up one lab on the moon. And the researchers would be much happier with their living conditions and much more productive.

Insofar in that all vertebrates are supposed to have one.

how can it be colder than similar craters on pluto? colder than icy Titan?

These lunar south pole craters never get any radiation from Sol at all.

These are temperatures colder than those *MEASURED* elsewhere in the solar system. That doesn't mean there aren't colder spots on Pluto, etc., only that we haven't observed any such temperatures!