How to Use kelvin in a Sentence

kelvin

noun
  • At night, the surface of even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, drops to about 95 kelvin.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Four out of the seven base units within the SI will be changed in total, including the ampre, the kelvin, and the mole.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 20 May 2019
  • So on the kelvin scale, the processor is 180 times colder than the temperature of space.
    Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Along with the kilogram, the ampere (the unit of electric current), kelvin (temperature) and mole (amount of a substance) will get new definitions.
    Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2018
  • To do it, the researchers trapped deuterium ions in a cage of electric fields, flushed them with hydrogen gas and cooled everything down to an extremely chilly 15 kelvins.
    Elise Cutts, Scientific American, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Cornell and Wieman were trying to cool a puff of rubidium gas to within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero—colder than any place in nature, even the 2.73 kelvins of space.
    Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 7 Sep. 2017
  • But Spitzer used passive methods—reflective materials and radiators to shed heat into space—to cool most of the spacecraft to 40 kelvins.
    Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Inside the sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, temperatures can swell to 15 million kelvin.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. 2022
  • The second challenge was to ensure the detectors worked properly by achieving a temperature of 7 kelvin (266º C below freezing).
    Dhananjay Khadilkar, Ars Technica, 10 Aug. 2022
  • Aspelmeyer’s group says that the spread in their particle’s position is only 1.3 times that of the zero-point motion, equivalent to a temperature of just a few millionths of a kelvin above absolute zero.
    Quanta Magazine, 18 Aug. 2021
  • The review concerns a potential redefinition of the ampere (a unit of electricity), the kelvin (temperature), the mole (measurement of atoms and or molecules) and the kilogram.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 20 Oct. 2017
  • Lightforce takes special care to ensure its driving lights operate at 5,000 kelvin, which should be considered an ideal color temperature.
    Wes Siler, Outside Online, 18 Aug. 2020
  • Color temperature addresses a unit of measurement called degrees kelvin.
    Popular Science, 15 Apr. 2020
  • Pluto’s surface temperature reaches about 40 degrees kelvin.
    Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. 2019
  • For one thing, the material seems to act suspiciously like a cuprate, a type of exotic ceramic in which superconductivity can occur at temperatures up to about 140 kelvin, or halfway between absolute zero and room temperature.
    David H. Freedman, WIRED, 5 May 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'kelvin.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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