(Image Credit: Bill Saxton; NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA/Hubble; Raghvendra Sahai)
Happy Halloween, with regards, the universe!
About 5,000 light years from Earth sits a ghostly looking nebula, which is the coldest known area in the universe with a temperature of a chilly 272 degrees celcius.
The dead star which created the Boomerang Nebula is releasing gas that is producing the unique shape of the object, and is cooling as it flows away from the white dwarf star – much like how a refrigerator system cools.
“This ultra-cold object is extremely intriguing, and we’re learning much more about its true nature with ALMA,” says Raghvendra Sahai, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory principal scientist who led the research. “What seemed like a double lobe, or ‘boomerang’ shape, from Earth-based optical telescopes, is actually a much broader structure that is expanding rapidly into space.”
Check out the entire article here on Live Science.
