The coldest place in the universe? The Boomerang Nebula

The Boomerang Nebula is a reflective cloud of dust and ionized gas - a young planetary nebula with a dying red giant star in the center, once very similar to our sun, which has lost its outer layers as predicted during the later stages of its life. . But it has been found to be losing its mass about 100 times faster than other similar dying stars.

Furthermore, it is doing so at a staggering rate 100 billion times faster than Earth's sun. According to NASA, this has actually resulted in the central star losing nearly one and a half times the mass of our Sun over the past 1,500 years. And, because the gases are being expelled so quickly - and at a speed of 164 km / s - it is releasing a lot of thermal energy.

Credits: NASA / ESA The result of this is a very cold region of space and is better to express it by summarizing the lowest limit of the thermodynamic temperature scale: absolute zero. On the Celsius scale this is -273.15 degrees, very close to the deep interior of the Boomerang Nebula, which is -237.59 degrees Celsius, which is even lower than that of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) left over from the Big Bang ( -270.4 degrees Celsius).

According to astronomer Raghvendra Sahai - who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California - it is possible that a small companion star has plunged into the giant red. "The only way to eject so much mass at such extreme speeds is the gravitational energy of two interacting stars which would explain the enigmatic properties of ultra-cold runoff," he said in a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.