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The human race has achieved some amazing things lately. Let's take a look.
Farthest Man-made Object From Earth
Voyager 1, a 1,592 lb space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977 to study the outer Solar System is the farthest man-made object from Earth. It has been operating for 36 years, 5 months and 19 days as of today and communicates with its controllers on Earth using the Deep Space Network. It is currently 127.25 AU (roughly 12 billion miles) away from Earth. On August 25, 2012, it crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space. It is currently moving at 38,000 mph relative to the Sun.
Fastest Moving Man-made Object
Helios 2, one of a pair of probes for studying solar processes, reached a speed of 157,078 mph (43.63 miles per second). Launched on January 15, 1976, the probe flew within 0.29 AU (27 million miles) of the Sun. The probe is no longer functional but remains in orbit around the Sun.
Coldest Man-made Temperature
MIT Scientists cooled a sodium gas to 0.5 nanokelvin (half a billionth of a degree) above absolute zero in 2003. For perspective, this temperature is more than 100 times colder than it takes to make a Bose-Einstein condensate. The coldest temperatures observed to occur naturally in the universe are above 3 Kelvin. To reach the record-low temperature, the MIT researchers invented a technique using what is called a gravito-magnetic trap. NASA is planning to break the record in 2016 on the International Space Station by achieving a temperature of 0.1 nanokelvin.
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Hottest Man-made Temperature
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), achieved a temperature of 5.5 trillion Kelvin (10 trillion degrees Fahrenheit) in 2012. This corresponds to conditions thought to exist microseconds after the Big Bang, before matter coalesced into atoms. ALICE collides lead ions at speeds close to the speed of light to create a high temperature plasma. To put this temperature in perspective, this temperature is almost a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun (27 million degrees Fahrenheit).
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