Jus wondering like why asteroids and those detachable things from spaceships catch fire when entering earth
In: 5
Particles in a gas or liquid are constantly bouncing around.
What we call “heat” is a measurement of how fast they’re bouncing around.
When something pushes them together, they hit each other more and bounce around faster.
Stuff hitting the air in Earth’s atmosphere hits lots of air particles really hard, which pushes them together really hard, which makes them bounce around really fast, which is another way of saying they get really hot.
This is an oversimplification but I think it conveys the basic idea: heat is a measurement of the kinetic energy of particles and compressing a given volume of particles increases that kinetic energy.
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