Just as the cold was one of the most powerful enemies of ‘General Winter’, for the Universe it is one of the closest stars and similar to the sun. The Boomerang Nebula is officially the coldest place in the uninhabited world. This nebula is relatively close, 5,000 light-years from the Solar System.
Is a planetary nebula, product of a star, a red giant, that is reaching the end of its life. Before reaching this phase, It was a star similar to the Sun. Recently, it has been expelling its outer layers into space.
Being so close to the Sun makes it extinct, now it is the coldest corner of the world
To put it in comparison to the Sun, it is losing mass about a hundred billion times faster than our star. The rhythm is so high that, In just 1,500 years, the star at the center of the Boomerang Nebula has lost the equivalent of 1.5 times the mass of the Sun.
The gases are also being expelled at a very high speed, at 164 km/s, expelling a large amount of energy. The result is the formation of an extremely cold region, very close to absolute zero.
If temperature is defined as the random motion of the particles that make up something, negative temperatures should be impossible. However, in 1949 the existence of temperatures below absolute zero.
Physicists define temperature in more than one way, including that temperature is a measure of order within a system, with more order equaling lower temperatures. According to this definition, potentially included within the atmospheres of gas giant planets.
The temperature of the Boomerang Nebula
The interior of the Boomerang Nebula has a temperature of -272ºC. Absolute zero is -273.15ºC. To put it into perspective, it is three times colder than the lowest temperature recorded on Earth.
It must be taken into account that the coldest temperature recorded on Earth It occurred in 1983 in Vostok, Antarctica, when -89.2°C was reached. It is the coldest place in the world. But it is an uninhabited place, so usually when we talk about the coldest place on Earth it is usually located somewhere else. He Coldest place on Earth in an inhabited place is Siberta-Oymyakon (Eastern Siberia) whose coldest temperature recorded was -67-8ºC.
Nothing to do with the lowest temperature recorded in Spain (-32ºC) in Lake Estangento, in the Pyrenees of Lérida or the temperatures reached in the officially considered coldest place in Spain: Molina de Aragón (Guadalajara).
And the Boomerang Nebula is so cold that it even has a temperature lower than that of the microwave background radiation. That radiation is the glow of the universe’s first light, emitted about 377,000 years after the Big Bang.
How is this possible?
The Boomerang Nebula absorbs that minimal heat that comes from the microwave background radiation. Something that was observed when it was discovered in 1980, when Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrot studied it. Just a decade later, in 1990, Astronomer Raghvendra Sahai published a study in which he predicted the existence of very cold regions in the universe.
The proposed mechanism was the following: the wind from a star could expand rapidly as it moved away from the star, causing a drop in temperature. In other words, On a cosmic scale, it would be like a kind of refrigerator. With this in mind, in 1995, Sahai himself observed the Boomerang Nebula, seeking to verify if his assumption was correct. It was there that the temperature of the nebula was determined, and it was established as the coldest place in the universe.