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The 'Boomerang Nebula' (also called the 'Bow Tie Nebula'^[1]) is a protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth in the Centaurus constellation. The nebula was - remembering we see it as it appeared 5,000 years ago - at 1 Kelvin, the coldest place known outside a laboratory. The Boomerang Nebula was formed from the outflow of gas from a star at its core. The gas was moving outwards at a speed of about 164 km/s and expanded rapidly as it moved out into space. This expansion was the cause of the nebula's very low temperature.
The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998. It is believed that the nebula is a star or stellar system evolving toward the planetary nebula phase.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott called it the 'Boomerang Nebula' in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory. Unable to see the detail that only Hubble can reveal, the astronomers saw merely a slight asymmetry in the nebula's lobes, suggesting a curved shape like a boomerang. The high-resolution Hubble images indicate that the 'Bow Tie Nebula' would perhaps have been a better name.¹

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★ The Boomerang Nebula: The Coldest Region of the Universe?, by Raghvendra Sahai and Lars-Åke Nyman, ''The Astrophysical Journal'', 487:L155–L159, 1 October 1997; see also The Chilliest of Stars, by Malcolm W. Browne, ''New York Times'', 24 June 1997

★ The Boomerang Nebula - The Coolest Place in the Universe?, ESA, 20 February 2003

★ Hubble's View of the Boomerang Nebula, 13 September 2005; see also Scattered Light from the Boomerang Nebula

★ ESA/Hubble-Boomerang Nebula

★ SIMBAD, Coordinates and Scientific data. January 4, 2007.