Does a object gain heat faster the colder it is? Does an object at $-273°{\rm C}$ gain heat faster than an object at $-1°{\rm C}$
 A: Heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation is a function of the difference in temperature between two objects, or an object and it's surroundings (for radiation it's the difference between the fourth powers of the temperatures, but the effect is the same). So if you have two objects, one at $0^o$C and one at $-100^o$C, sitting in the same room at $20^o$C, the heat transfer to the object at $-100^o$C will be much greater than to the object at $0^o$C. This means that the $-100^o$C object will warm up at a faster rate, but won't ever become warmer than the $0^0$C object.
A: In order to answer your question definitively, one would need to know from what source the object was gaining heat, and how the heat was being transferred from the source to the object.
However, generally heat will be transferred more rapidly where there is a larger temperature difference between the source and the recipient object.
If you poured a cup of water on a steel table at -1C, the water in the cup would take longer to freeze than if you had poured it onto a table at -273C.
