How Many States of Matter Are There?

In school, you probably learned that there are three - solid, liquid, and gas. And somebody probably used water to demonstrate.

You have probably learned that no, there are four. The fourth state is plasma, which we knew about in the 1920s. Plasma is essentially a charged gas, and is generally found in and around stars. The interior of the sun is mostly plasma.

Except.

There are actually five states of matter.

The fifth is what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Some things really, really don't want to be anything but a gas. Cool them down far enough and they become something else....and it's quite interesting indeed.

BEC's are quantum. They are a wave as well as matter. We've never observed them in the wild and making them in the lab is tricky because they warm back up at the drop of, well, an atom. Enter the ISS: We've actually been able to make BECs that last more than a second in space. Now we might be able to study them properly...and learn some things about the universe we didn't know.