The coldest, naturally-formed place in our galaxy is the Boomerang Nebula, located in the Centaurus constellation 5,000 light years away from Earth. It has a temperature of -272 degrees Celsius, just one degree above absolute zero (0 K). As far as we know, it is also the coldest place in the universe.
The reason why that region is so cold is because a dying star in the center of the nebula is ejecting gas in all directions. That is why the surrounding region -the nebula- is getting cooler every second.
However, the lowest temperature in the Milky Way -and the rest of the universe- was artificially achieved here on Earth in 2015. Scientists at MIT managed to cool sodium potassium molecules to a temperature of just 500 nanokelvins. That is -273.1499995 degrees Celsius, a million times colder than interstellar space. At the atomic level, scientists believe these molecules ended up looking like this:
At that temperature the atoms stop moving, and instead they clump together until they begin to behave like a single “super-atom.”
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