Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1031724-20161216073105/@comment-26917787-20161220020829

Well first: http://www.sparknotes.com/mindhut/2013/04/26/the-8-biggest-scientific-errors-in-the-avengers/slide/3

There's no way the Tesseract was heated to 120 million Kelvin, or else there would have been no Earth to avenge. Maybe the heat was contained inside the Tesseract and was prevented from escaping, so on the exterior, the cube was a relatively low temperature.

Also, during the scene, you can see the Tesseract release some sort of steam or smoke, and I think Fury burned himself, so it still had quite a bit of heat when Fury grabbed it.

And time. Red Skull held onto the cube for quite a bit of time, while Fury grabbed it and immediately placed it in the container.