Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers successfully cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium in a temperature just a little over absolute zero, and over a million times colder than interstellar space.

Scientists have long theorized that if the air is cooled to near absolute zero Klevin temperatures, the molecules will halt and cease their motion and will start behaving as one collective body.

This orderly molecular behavior of gaseous molecules then begins to form very strange, exotic states of matter. These are states are those that have never been observed in the physical world.

The same was done by MIT researchers they cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) to a temperature of 500 nanokelvins.

Researchers during the experiment found that the ultracold molecules were relatively long-lived and stable, resisting reactive collisions with other molecules.

The molecules also exhibited very strong dipole moments, which is strong imbalances in electric charge within molecules that mediate magnet-like forces between molecules over large distances, said researchers.

Martin Zwierlein, principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, said in a statement that while molecules are normally full of energy, vibrating and rotating and moving through space at a frenetic pace, the group's ultracold molecules have been effectively stilled.

They are very close to the temperature at which quantum mechanics plays a big role in the motion of molecules, said Zwierlein.

"And with ultracold molecules, you can get a huge variety of different states of matter, like superfluid crystals, which are crystalline, yet feel no friction, which is totally bizarre", Zwierlein said.

Zwierlein along with graduate student Jee Woo Park and postdoc Sebastian Will published the findings of their research in the journal Physical Review Letters.