A team of Chinese scientists has successfully teleported a particle to a satellite in space.

As Time reports, the scientists sent a photon nearly 300 miles to a satellite orbiting Earth, which is the farthest recorded distance for quantum teleportation trials thus far. The Tibetan team had been teleporting scores of photons up from their laboratory for roughly a month, of which 900 trials were successful.

Although quantum teleportation may sound like something out of a science-fiction film, the science behind the process is far from fiction. In fact, the entire process is based around the idea that quantum information— i.e. the state of an atom, photon or other particle— can be transmitted from one location to another by means of entangled communications between the sending and receiving locations.

Though the first successful quantum teleportation experiment occurred only a year ago, this latest success prompts many in the field of quantum physics and teleportation to believe that this could open the door for more advancements and achievements to be made— including some that could make a globally-accessible quantum-transmitted Internet service possible.

Top photo courtesy of Skye D./Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

Natalie Wickstrom is a freelance writer based in Athens, Georgia. She most likely wrote this piece to the tune of a movie score whilst chewing gum.

The experiment broke the previous distance record by more than three times.

When it comes to weird quantum effects, none is weirder than quantum teleportation. Scientists can—and have—used the unique and complicated physics of quantum mechanics to instantaneously teleport small particles across great distances. Now, a Chinese team has broken the distance record by teleporting particles to a satellite in space.

When we talk about teleportation, we should be clear about exactly what that means. Nobody's beaming people to space like in Star Trek. Instead, quantum teleportation is a complicated and delicate process involving sending information across space using entangled particles and reassembling it somewhere else.

We've written about quantum teleportation before, and a full explainer can be found here.

The hardest part of quantum teleportation is the entanglement. When two particles are entangled, they're essentially 'in sync' with each other, and they'll stay in sync no matter how far apart they are. But if one of the particles hits something else—like the air, or a beam of light, or literally anything—then the entanglement could be broken.

As you might imagine, keeping two particles entangled over large distances or for long periods of time is incredibly challenging. Until about a month ago, the farthest anyone had been able to separate entangled particles by was a few miles. But a Chinese team broke the record in June when they sent entangled particles to a satellite orbiting overhead, more than 300 miles away, while the particles they were entangled with remained on Earth.

Now, the same team has used those entangled particles to teleport photons from Earth to the satellite. Again, we need to be careful about what we mean when we say "teleport." In this case, the scientists are sending information—they're transferring information from a particle on the ground to a different particle in space, which takes on that information and essentially becomes the ground particle.

So, this isn't Star Trek. This can't be used to beam yourself into space or across the country, and faster-than-light communication is still impossible. But that doesn't make this technology useless. Someday, quantum teleportation could be used as a form of encryption—because if anyone intercepts the communication it'll mess up the entanglement—and to send results from quantum computers around the world.