It’s the sun, it’s literally a burning ball of gas providing energy to countless things millions of kilometers away… How can humans make something that is hotter than that? And how is lightning hotter than the sun?
Edit: just to clarify how is it TECHNOLOGICALLY possible? Like what do you have to do to make something hotter than the sun?
In: Physics
> just to clarify how is it TECHNOLOGICALLY possible?
Temperature can be loosely understood as the *average* energy in the system. So temperature is something like “energy / size”. The sun has a high temperature because it has a *lot* of energy, even at its massive size.
But having a lot of energy is not the only way to have a high temperature. It’s easier to just reduce the size of the system. So, technologically, you can make something extremely hot, **millions** of times hotter than the sun’s core, by taking some unimpressive amount of energy but squeezing it into a *tiny* area.
Any time you have some quantity that equal to “A divided by B”, you can make that quantity extremely large if you can get ‘B’ to be small. Lots of examples of this in engineering/physics, but the classic example is power (energy / time). If you make your timescales short enough, you can make the power of a system become basically as high as you want.
Nuclear bombs have powers matching that of the sun’s entire output, but only for a fraction of a second. For unbiased comparisons, look at *energy*. Energy is what makes the world go round, and there’s no technological trickery you can apply to get more of it.
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