# @science on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DOGBNBuCa0_
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/34058356-science-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/d595ffd66b.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-09-02T09:00:26.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Science 🧬 (@science) — https://gondola.cc/science

## Caption

For nearly a century, physicists have suspected that heat, under the strangest conditions, could behave like sound. Now, MIT scientists have finally captured it on camera: a phenomenon called “second sound,” where heat doesn’t just diffuse outward but sloshes back and forth like a wave.⁠
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The effect emerges inside a superfluid, a frictionless state of matter created when clouds of atoms are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero. In this extreme environment, lithium-6 atoms pair up and move without resistance. Instead of fading evenly, a burst of heat oscillates through the superfluid, invisible to the eye but strikingly similar to ripples of sound.⁠
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To reveal it, researchers developed an ingenious heat-mapping method. Normally, thermography relies on infrared radiation, but ultracold gases emit none. The team instead tuned into the atoms’ radio-frequency “voices,” which shift with temperature. By making the “hotter” fermions resonate, they filmed the pure motion of heat, watching it rebound inside the gas while the density stayed nearly unchanged, a clean signature of second sound.⁠
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First predicted in 1938 by László Tisza and refined by Lev Landau’s two-fluid model, second sound has now moved from theory to direct observation. The result provides a precision probe for the superfluid transition itself, letting scientists measure how temperature waves slow, reflect, and couple to matter as the system crosses critical thresholds.⁠
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Though these exotic states seem far from daily life, their secrets reach from lab benches to cosmic extremes. Mapping heat as a wave could illuminate high-temperature superconductors, where understanding thermal transport is key to near-lossless power grids, and the crusts of neutron stars, where quantum fluids churn and carry heat under crushing gravity.⁠
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#science #physics #superfluid #heat #quantum #superconductors #neutronstars #energy #research #discovery #mit⁠
Source: s41467-021-27907-z

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## Tags

superfluid, superconductors, energy, science, research, quantum, mit, discovery, neutronstars, physics, heat

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