The first day of spring may be in two weeks but don’t apply the SPF just yet. The winter chill has its teeth sunk in and it is not letting go. But in comparison to other places, is our neck of the woods really that cold?
Records from Accuweather.com show that the coldest daytime temperature recorded in Madison this year was on Jan. 5 and 7 and was a chilly 3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wisconsin’s coldest ever recorded temperature however, was on Feb.24, 1996 in the town Couderay. The temperature plummeted to a negative 55 degrees Fahrenheit. That is so cold that, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Wind Chill Chart, any skin exposed for longer than five minutes would succumb to frostbite. That may be cold, but it gets colder.

The coldest ever naturally occurring temperature on earth was recorded in Antarctica on July 21, 1983. The temperature was a frigid negative 128 degrees Fahrenheit. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid state, or dry ice, at negative 109 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of Antarctica that day was so cold it could have supported natural dry ice.

Even colder than that is what we find when we explore our closest celestial neighbor, the moon. Due to its tilt, only one side of the moon ever faces earth. This tilt also makes it impossible for sunlight to shine into the moon’s craters on the northern and southern poles. NASA’s Lunar Recon Orbiter finds the average temperatures of the northern and southern craters at a low reading of 34 degrees Kelvin (-397 degrees F).

On Jan. 19, 2006 NASA launched the New Horizons probe on a decade long journey to reach our solar systems distant Kuiper belt. Once there, New Horizons will examine objects in the belt. More specifically, it will examine the former planet Pluto and its moons. No definite readings have come back from the target region yet, but scientists estimate the average temperatures there are about 40 Kelvin (-387 degrees F). New Horizons is expected to reach Pluto on July 14 of this year.

About 400 light years from earth, there is a hole in the universe. An enormous mass of silicates and H2O particles called Barnard 68. This cloud is so dense and opaque that no light can pass through it. Barnard 68 blocks out a patch of light from the stars behind it and gives it the illusion of a black smudge or a “hole” in the sky. Because no light can get through this massive cloud, scientists find the temperature around the periphery of the cloud to be about 16 Kelvin (-257 degrees F) and it gets colder the farther in you go.

But even farther at 5,000 light years from earth is the coldest known observable region in all of the known universe. The Boomerang, or Bow tie, Nebula is a late stage star emitting gasses at speeds upwards of 164 Kilometers per second. When a gas expands, the surrounding temperature drops. The speed at which these gasses are released is what causes the Boomerang Nebula to have a temperature as low as 1 Kelvin (-457 degrees F). That is just one degree above the lowest temperature possible known as absolute zero. This is remarkable considering deep space has an average reading of 2.7 Kelvin.

Even though the Boomerang Nebula may be the coldest naturally occurring place in our universe, the coldest artificial temperature was produced right here on earth. Yale University scientists cooled molecules of mstrontium monofluoride using lasers and a vacuum chamber. The result: the molecules cooled by the lasers were recorded at 2.5 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.

Something interesting happened as the scientists approached this record unbelievable cold; the atoms being manipulated by the lasers clumped together in an odd form of matter and the colder they became, the more alike they all behaved.

This strange phenomenon also slowed down the beams of light that were being shot into the vacuum. So much so that scientists were able to manipulate these beams of light and study them at a never before examinable level.  This new discovery is exciting to researchers because it could lead to quantum chemistry and could define many previously unexplained phenomena in our universe, which is pretty cool.

So as the roads remain slippery and the snow banks immobile, think of how cold it could be. At least it’s not the craters of the moon or in the depths of Barnard 68. And if things get really chilly, mysteries of the cosmos may be revealed, not in distance space, but on our own celestial rock.