It is my understanding that you can only heat something up to the temerpature the source of heat is. so if i have 10 1 sqft lenses focussing on 1 1sqft lens i would get 10x the energy [roughly] the 1sqft lens would focus. but if i did this in several levels making a million 1sqft of mirrors focussing to a thousand, focussing to 1 I would not get a million times the energy [roughly]
Is this correct?
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-i want to justify a high atmosphere magnifier rendering the Land below into dust. id rather it was a passive effect than needs a solar array and emitters of some kind.
In: Physics
> It is my understanding that you can only heat something up to the temperature the source of heat is.
I don’t believe so. I’m pretty sure the only limiting factors are the size of your reflector (how much energy it can gather) and the efficiency of the mirror.
As a thought experiment, if you set up a dyson sphere of mirrors that collected all the light leaving the sun, and focused all of it down on one car sized asteroid, I can’t see how that would possibly not get hotter than the surface of the sun.
I think the limit you heard probably has to do with just two objects next to each other radiating heat, with no concentration involved, in which case the system would tend towards equilibrium.
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