Forget snow and temperatures hovering around freezing, the Boomerang Nebula has it all beat.
The nebula, where a star is dying 5,000 light-years away from Earth, has created the coldest place in the known universe, Fox News reported Tuesday.
No pair of gloves or wool coat will be able to protect against this cold, either - the surface of the nebula is 1 degree Kelvin or minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly less than absolute zero. The phenomenon was discovered in 2013 when researchers used a special telescope in Chile to study it.
"This ultra-cold object is extremely intriguing, and we're learning much more about its true nature with ALMA," said the NASA scientist behind the research. "What seemed like a double lobe, or 'boomerang' shape ... is actually a much broader structure that is expanding rapidly into space."
The Boomerang Nebula is produced by the dying star, which was once like the sun. It emits a lot of gas, in the way that refrigerators stay cold by putting out expanding gas.
Eventually, the star will grow into a red giant, deplete its gas and dissipate into a dense stellar object called a white dwarf, according to Newser.
But the nebula will lose its title in 2016, when NASA will unveil a cold atom lab inside the International Space Station and create temperatures above absolute zero by just one ten-billionth of a degree.
