In an accomplishment that may sound ripped from the script of a futuristic sci-fi thriller or bring back memories of Star Trek's Scotty being beamed up to the Enterprise, a team of Chinese scientists has successfully teleported an object from Earth to space for the first time.

The team managed to send a photon from the ground to a satellite orbiting over 300 miles above Earth through a process known as 'quantum entanglement', according to MIT Technology Review.

According to the magazine, quantum entanglement is a "strange phenomenon" in which two quantum objects form at exactly the same instant and point in space and, therefore, share the same existence.

The experiment marks the furthest distance tested so far in teleportation experiments. Last month, the team also demonstrated the ability to send entangled photos in reverse, from space to Earth.

For approximately a month, scientists sent up millions of photos from their Tibet-based ground state to the satellite, and were successful 911 times.

"This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step towards global-scale quantum Internet," the team said in a statement, according to MIT Technology Review.

Scientists have noted that the advance may pave the way towards the establishment of an unhackable 'quantum Internet', in which information is encoded by the quantum states of entangled photons instead of strings of 0s and 1s. This would make it impossible for a hostile party to eavesdrop without disturbing the photons' states and revealing their presence.

"Space-scale teleportation can be realised and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum Internet," the authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China, wrote in a paper published by the Arvix website.

The UK's Guardian newspaper quoted Iam Walmsley, a professor of experimental physics at Oxford, as saying the work is a significant step towards the reality of a quantum Internet.

"This palpably indicates that the field isn't limited to scientists sitting in their labs thinking about weird things," he said. "Quantum phenomena actually have a utility and can really deliver some significant new technologies."

Source: Khaleej Times