If the Sun is able to keep Earth warm while being millions of miles away, shouldn’t it get warmer and warmer the closer you get to it (like when you go to space)? Like how it would get warmer if you were to approach a burning house for example?
In: Planetary Science
In space, the definition of temperature starts breaking down. That’s because when talking about temperature, you’re talking about the property of “stuff”. Air, water, rocks. Matter. Temperature is most commonly defined as kinetic energy of particles.
Vacuum of space is famously really empty. There’s not enough “stuff” to define it strictly as we do on earth. You get absolute nonsense like vacuum being 10 million degrees because the two protons per square kilometer have a lot of energy between them.
So you have to be very careful when talking about the temperature of space to define what you’re talking about.
If you put yourself between the earth and the sun, you’ll quickly find that you’re being heated as much as the earth is, because there’s sunlight shining on you. In fact, it’s quite difficult to cool down, because there’s very little to carry heat AWAY from you in the vacuum of space. And you’re not going to radiate more heat than you get until you’re, well, the temperature of the sun. As a human, I do not recommend being the temperature of the sun.
>Like how it would get warmer if you were to approach a burning house for example?
Well… That’s exactly what happens. That’s why Mercury is hotter than Earth.
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