eli5 How is it that things on earth can be “hotter than the surface of the sun”? If the sun is giving energy to basically everything on earth, wouldn’t any earth-item or organism only be able to mimic a fraction of the sun’s energy/power output?
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You are confusing Temperature and Heat. While the two are related, temperature is really just a measure of what we think of as hot and cold and heat is the amount of energy contained by an object.
You can have a high temperature object with very little heat; think a match for an example. It’s definitely hot, but it certainly won’t make you feel warmer in a cold room. Plus you can snuff out the flame with your fingers and barely feel it.
You can also have an object at a relatively low temperature that contains a lot of heat. Take a hot tub for instance and how you can overheat your body if you stay in too long despite it being maybe 10F above your own body temperature.
So no, we can absolutely not create anywhere remotely close to the heat than the sun is giving off but we can absolutely reach temperatures higher than the sun on a small scale.
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