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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The amount of energy radiating out from an object is described by [Stefan–Boltzmann law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law) it depends on the temperature and the emissivity of the material. Emissivity is how good a material in radiating out energy. The result is the power per square meter.
So if you heat an object with the same emissivity as the sun with a surface area of one square meter it will emit the same amount of energy as a square meter of the sun’s surface. The sun is enormous, its surface area is 12 000 times larger than the Earth so the amount of energy of a single square meter is only a small fraction of the total amount of energy. The surface area of the sound is 6 billion billion square meters.
This is really not any different than a candle emitting less heat than a large fire even if they burn at the same temperature.
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