BBC - Earth - Why The Coldest Place in The Universe Is So Special

BBC - Earth - Why the coldest place in the universe is so special
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The Boomerang Nebula, a strange and extremely frigid object 5,000 light
years away, gradually gives up its secrets
Presented by
Marcus Woo
Space is cold. Very cold. In fact, empty space, far from any star or other
hot object, is about -270 degrees C.
While downright frigida temperature low enough to freeze hydrogen on
Earththat's still about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest
possible temperature. The source of those couple of degrees is primordial:
the leftover glow of the big bang that gave birth to our universe.
The entire cosmos is bathed in this radiation, called the cosmic microwave
background. As a result, it's hard to avoid this bit of heat, meaning that in
most of the cosmos, -270 degrees is as cold as it gets.
But not everywhere.
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The Boomerang Nebula seen in mm wavelengths (credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/NASA/STScI

/JPL-Caltech)
5,000 light years away in Centaurus, a large constellation in the southern

sky, is the Boomerang Nebula, a cloud of gas being expelled from a dying
star.
"
This cloud is one of the most bizarre and mysterious
This is how stars die
streaming outwards, astronomers have found that
objects in the universe. Here, within the gas

the temperature drops as low as half a degree
above absolute zero.
It is, as far as anyone knows, the coldest place in the universe.
It may also prove to be quite important. Because this most frigid place, and
objects like it, albeit a tad warmermay help astronomers unravel a host of
cosmic conundrums, from the violent yet spectacular deaths of stars and
the formation of galaxies to cosmic explosions and the origin of life itself.
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Death of stars, birth of life

In many respects the Boomerang Nebula is unremarkable. All stars have to
die some day. When smaller stars end, those up to about eight times as
massive as our own sun, they produce a similar display of gas and dust.
An unstable red giant ejects gas as it nears the end of its life (credit: ESA/NASA)
During this transformation, each dying low-mass star will cool and swell,
becoming what's called a red giant. In a few billion years, when our own
sun exhausts its nuclear fuel, it will similarly cool and grow, until it engulfs
Mercury, Venus, and possibly even Earth.
The temperature of the star's outer layers drops low enough such that
molecules start clumping together, condensing into dust particles. Starlight
radiating from below smacks into these particles and ejects them outward.
The particles drag the star's outer gas layers along, creating vast clouds
like the ones seen in the Boomerang.
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Ultraviolet radiation from the dying star heats the
"
gas, making it glow. Eventually, the radiation strips
In every which way

we look at this object,
it's extreme
clouds. Once this ionisation process is complete,
away the electrons from the atoms that make up the

whats left is called a planetary nebula, which is a
misnomer of a name, originating when astronomers
a century ago mistook these bright objects for
planets. Meanwhile, the dying star collapses into its
final stage: a hot and dense object called a white
dwarf. Our sun will collapse into a white dwarf the size of Earth.
Gas races away from a planetary nebula (credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO
Team)
"This is how stars die," says Sun Kwok, an astronomer at the University of
Hong Kong. "They are born; they have a long lifebillions of years of life.
And they die very suddenly over a very short period of time.
But that also means that objects such as the Boomerang Nebula are
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incredibly useful; as by studying them astronomers can solve the mysteries

of stellar death. "We're interested in how they die, why they die," Kwok
says. "The good thing is that before they die, they put up a huge
spectacular showlike fireworks."
And the deaths of stars play a crucial role in the birth of life. Astronomers
have long known that many elements such as carbon, oxygen, and even
iron are fused inside the cores of stars. When the stars die, those
elements are distributed across the galaxy. And when very massive stars
diethose more than about eight times the mass of the sunthey explode
instead of creating planetary nebulae, creating even heavier elements that
become the building blocks for rocks, planets, and even life.
The Eskimo Nebula (Credit: NASA, A. Fruchter and ERO Team, S. Baggett, R. Hook, Z.
Levay)
In the last decade, Kwok says, he and his colleagues are learning that
even planetary nebulae may be contributing to life by producing complex
organic compounds. Some of these compounds may have made their way
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to our solar system as the planets were forming. And, they may have been
key ingredients for the origin of life on Earth.
A special nebula
The Boomerang Nebula, however, is special.
For a start, the planetary nebula phase of a star's lifecycle lasts only a few
tens of thousands of years. The Boomerang is not yet a full-fledged
planetary nebula, since its central star hasn't ionised its surroundings. So
it's a pre-planetary nebula, a transition stage that lasts only about a
thousand yearsa mere blink in cosmic time, and one that we are lucky to
witness.
The Boomerang Nebula is still relatively young (credit: ESA/NASA)
Pre-planetary nebulae are important to astronomers such as Kwok

because they provide a glimpse for how stars transform from a swollen red
giant to a complex and dazzling planetary nebula. Although a dying star is
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round, a planetary nebula is not. It often has a bipolar shape, with lobes
expanding out from two ends. As the Hubble Space Telescope has
revealed in dramatic fashion, from our point of view on Earth, these nebulae
sometimes appear to have intricate structures of interlocking rings and
arcs.
"
The metamorphosis of a round star into a planetary
I don't think there's

any theoretical
explanation yet as to
how this object is
what it is right now
says Kwok, who did pioneering work on
nebula is akin to a caterpillar turning into a butterfly,

pre-planetary nebulae in the 1990s. Looking at the
Boomerang, he says, is like peering into a cocoon
just before a butterfly emerges.
But none of that explains why the Boomerang is so
cold?
The blue regions of the Boomerang Nebula are the coldest (credit: NASA /SPL)
The Boomerang Nebula got its name because it appeared to have a curved
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shape like a boomerang. In 1995, Raghvendra Sahai, an astronomer at

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Lars-ke
Nyman, now at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
telescope in Chile, took a closer look with a telescope in Chile, observing in
millimetre wavelengths that revealed clouds of gas molecules. They found
that the Boomerang wasn't a boomerang, but a round cloud expanding at a
prodigious rate.
"In every which way we look at this object, it's extreme," Sahai says.
He and Nyman discovered that the gas was gushing out at 164 km/s,
almost 4,000 times faster than the average high-speed train and ten times
faster than the typical speeds seen in similar objects. Such high speeds
meant that for the last 1,500 years, the central star was losing mass at a
rate of one-thousandths of a sun every year, ten times faster than what's
been measured in similar stars that are ejecting gas.
The Helix Nebula up close (credit: NASA/NOAO/ESA/Hub Hel Neb Team/M. Meixner/T.
Rector)
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This speed is why the Boomerang is so cold, Sahai explains.

Gas gets cold as it expands, which you can feel if you place your hand over
a tyre nozzle as air is being let out. And if the gas expands as fast as it
does in the Boomerang, it can get really cold. The nebula also contains a
lot of gas, which makes it difficult for the ambient heat from the cosmic
microwave background to seep in, helping the gas remain at a low
temperature. With the exception of the artificial conditions created in
certain laboratories on Earth, there's no known colder place in the
universe.
The cold wasn't a complete surprise, however.
Sahai previously hypothesised that if certain conditions were just right, and
if the central star were ejecting gas fast enough, the temperature could
drop below the cosmic microwave background. Still, it was just a theoretical
possibility. When he started analysing that Boomerang data nearly 20
years ago, however, he realised that his prediction was coming true. "My
hair stood on end," he recalls. "That was one of the most exciting parts of
my career."
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The Helix Nebula seen by Hubble (credit: NASA/ESA/C. O'Dell/M. Meixner/P. McCullough)
Still, exactly how the central star ejects gas so fast remains a mystery,
Sahai says.
According to conventional theory, it's the radiation from the star that's
pushing out all that material. But, the star inside the Boomerang is nowhere
bright enough to produce the radiation needed to cause gas to be ejected
at 164 km/s. "I don't think there's any theoretical explanation yet as to how
this object is what it is right now," Sahai says.
Bizarre indeed.
Boomerang revisited
The Boomerang has also perplexed scientists in other ways. In the nearly
two decades since the Boomerang was discovered to be the coldest region
in the universe, Sahai and his colleagues have continued to explore the
extreme object, slowly peeling back layers of complexity and mystery.
And one of the first puzzles to solve was its shape.
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The Spirograph Nebula, 2,000 light years away (credit:NASA/Hub Heritage Team/STScI
/AURA)
Sahai and Nyman's observations in submillimetre wavelengths revealed

that the Boomerang consisted of a round, expanding molecular cloud. But
what did it look like in visible light? In 1998, astronomers pointed the
Hubble Space Telescope at the Boomerang to find out. The nebula didn't
look round nor did it look like a boomerang. Instead, it boasted an
hourglass figure.
Astronomers didn't know why the Boomerang looked so different in visible
light compared to submillimetre, and the problem wasn't solved until last
year, when Sahai and his colleagues described their latest observations
using the new ALMA telescope in Chile, which allowed them make the
most detailed observations of the nebula yet.
The researchers discovered that the Boomerang has a complex structure
consisting of three parts. First, there is the large, round, expanding
molecular gas cloudthe same cloud that was observed earlier. But
zooming in, the astronomers found a denser, doughnut-shaped cloud of
dust surrounding the central star.
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The Crab Nebula supernova remnant (credit: NASA/ESA/Herschel/PACS/MESS/A. Loll/J.

Hester)
This dusty doughnut, the astronomers realised, acts like a mask, blocking
the starlight emanating from the star's equator. Because light can only
escape from the two poles, it illuminates the surrounding gas like two
flashlights pointing in opposite directions. So the two lobes seen in the
Hubble images are the beams of those flashlights shining through the
gasjust as how you can see the beams of a car's headlights on a foggy
night.
"
The new ALMA observations showed why the
These are not just

beautiful objects. They
hold many secrets
shaped. But zooming in further, the astronomers
Boomerang could appear both round and hourglassfound yet another structure: a hollow cylindrical
nebula surrounding the central star. Sahai suspects
that the cylindrical walls were formed by powerful
jets of hydrogen or helium gas blasting from the
star's poles, carving out a tunnel in the ambient gas.
Jetting forward
Where do these jets come from?
It turns out that jets are a common phenomenon in the universe, shooting
out from many kinds of stars and even enormous black holes billions of
times more massive than the sun. Although the details are unknown, they
happen when a disc of gas and dust spirals into the star or black hole. The
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falling matter carries energy, which is released via narrow jets shooting out
in opposite directions.
Trifid Nebula, a nursery for young new stars (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)
In planetary nebulae, these jets are made of gas. But in the supermassive
black holes that reside at the centre of galaxies, they're likely charged
particles blasting out at extreme speeds. These black-hole powered jets
are so powerful that they can blow bubbles in the hot gas that permeates
the space between the galaxies in a galaxy cluster. The way these jets
inject heat and gas into their environments influences how galaxies form
and evolve.
Even though the bubbles blown by these jets are up to a million times
bigger and even though the gas, at tens of million of degrees, is far from
cold, the general process is the same as what happens in systems such as
the Boomerang, says astronomer Noam Soker of Technion University in
Israel. So by studying the jets in the Boomerang and other planetary
nebulae, astronomers can learn about galaxies and the supermassive
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black hole at their centres.

Jets are also thought to be involved in the strange explosions known as
gamma-ray bursts, which are some of the most powerful cosmic
phenomena observed, Soker says. He also thinks they may help drive
supernovaethe explosive deaths of very massive stars.
The giant Eta Carinae star at the centre of the Carina Nebula (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
"This is a highly controversial subject," he notes, as most astronomers

think supernovae are propelled by an eruption of energetic particles called
neutrinos. Still, current theories aren't satisfactory and the ubiquity of jets
makes them a plausible mechanism, he says.
As for the Boomerang, there's still much to learn about what Sahai calls
one of his favourite objects in the universe.
He and his colleagues plan to study it further with ALMA later this year.
Their earlier observations showed that in the inner regions, the gas moves
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at a mere 35 km/s. With more detailed data, they hope to map exactly how
fast different regions of the expanding gas cloud are moving. They also
want to better understand the dusty doughnut at the centre.
The Boomerang is bizarre because it's a frigid place. But for astronomers,
the nebula and its brethren are more than that. "These are not just beautiful
objects," Soker says. "They hold many secrets."
The Orion Nebula, the Mayan cosmic fire of creation (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)
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