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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Temperature is the average speed of molecules jiggling around. Each molecule in an area needs a certain amount of energy to reach a high speed and meet or exceed the temperature of the sun. But if the area is small and there aren’t many molecules, the total amount of energy is small. You do need to concentrate the energy of the sun by somehow storing it then releasing it, but this can happen naturally with electrical charge (lightning) and artificially with both electricity and other means.
Yes, the Earth does get *most* of its heat and energy from the sun (though nuclear reactions can “create” energy – or to be precise, convert stored energy into heat – in a way that is not directly related to energy received from the sun). So it would not be realistic to heat the ENTIRE earth to be hotter than the sun, but concentrating that energy into a small spot is another question.
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