Frozen universe
FROZEN UNIVERSE
IT’S TIME TO WRAP UP WARM AND EXPLORE THE BOOMERANG NEBULA – A PECULIAR PLACE WITH THE COLDEST KNOWN NATURAL TEMPERATURE
Reported by David Crookes
© Tobias Roetsch
In the Northern Hemisphere, we’re currently feeling temperatures drop. But while it certainly feels pretty cold, we’d hazard a guess that the temperature hasn’t dropped as low as the -93.2 degrees Celsius (-199.8 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded across Dome Fuji, Antarctica, in 2010. A visit there would require the thickest of coats and a vacuum flask topped up with a steaming-hot beverage. Yet imagine venturing somewhere even colder than that –a journey to the coldest place in the universe, in fact. You’ll need to crack the secret of a very long life and some clever scientist will have to work out how to travel at the speed of light, but a cold welcome awaits nonetheless.
Should you be up for the challenge, your destination will be the Boomerang Nebula, a reflecting cloud of dust and ionised gases and the coldest known place in the universe. This preplanetary nebula with a dying star at its centre is located some 5,000 light years from Earth in Centaurus, and it’s so utterly freezing that if you ever did make it there, you’d be unlikely to ever come back, regardless of its name. To give you an idea of how cold it is, let’s recap the lowest limit of the thermodynamic temperature scale: absolute zero. On the Celsius scale this is -273.15 degrees, and on the Fahrenheit scale it’s -459.67 degrees.
© NASA
BOOMERANG NEBULA BY NUMBERS
5,000
light years away from Earth
x10
It ejects matter ten times faster than a single star could on its own
3 trillion The outflow stretches more than 3 trillion kilometres end to end
ONE
Each lobe is one light year in length
100,000
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across
21,000 times the distance between the Sun and Earth
150KM
The outflow is travelling at 150 kilometres per second
1980
The year the name was coined
One of the 12-metre (39.4-foot) antennae that make up ALMA
© ESO
“DUST GRAINS HAVE CREATED A MASK THAT SHADES A PORTION OF THE CENTRAL STAR”
NATIONAL RADIO ASTRONOMY OBSERVATORY
Since the Boomerang Nebula’s deep interior temperature is a teeth-chattering -272 degrees Celsius or -458 degrees Fahrenheit, this places it just a degree Celsius above absolute zero. That makes it a whopping three times chillier than the temperature recorded across Dome Fuji.