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Kevin is standing outside of Building 2 at NASA/Goddard Space
Flight Center.
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KEVIN: An ordinary object does not change much when an X-ray hits it; so making it cold helps in two ways. One, it means that the temperature change is a larger fraction of the temperature that it's sitting at and two, the heat capacity of almost everything goes down very rapidly as you get close to absolute zero. So a little bit of energy causes the temperature to rise a lot. So we have to keep it very, very cold.
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Graphic: 0.060 kelvin
Caroline is in the lab, in a bunny suit, holding the microcalorimeter array.
An animation shows a close-up of the individual thermometers in the array. It them zooms out to show the placement of the array in the XRS and then the placement of that in Suzaku.
Graphic:
"Absolute Zero is: The point where molecules reach their slowest oscillations."
"0 kelvin"
"or..."
"-273 degrees Celsius"
"or..."
"-459 degrees Fahrenheit"
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CAROLINE: We have to operate this detector at 60 millidegrees above absolute zero. So that's what the rest of the XRS instrument does - it makes this tiny detector cold.
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