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: 19
Because atmosphere
Outer space does not have an atmosphere, any object heated by the sun in that space will quickly lose that heat if it moves away and/or into the sun’s shadow (e.g. behind a planet)
Earth does have an atmosphere, so for example when the sun sets and it becomes night time, the location where it becomes night doesn’t become cold immediately.
The temperature of something is the average amount that the atoms in that thing are moving. Space is almost a perfect vacuum and so there simply aren’t enough atoms in a given volume of space to contribute enough movement to raise the temperature any significant amount.
The light of the sun travels through empty space and when it hits something the energy contained within it causes the atoms of that object to move around. As the air is less dense than the ground most of that energy makes it all of the way to the surface of the planet. That heat then radiates upwards from the surface into the surrounding air. This is why temperature drops as you go higher up despite you technically getting closer to the source.
*Things* can have a temperature. *Nothing* can’t have a temperature because…I mean…it’s nothing.
If there’s a *thing* near the sun, that thing will be warmed up on the side facing the sun. The space inbetween the sun and the thing is *nothing*, so there is nothing inbetween to warm up.
If *you* approach the sun, you will indeed feel warmer and warmer the closer you get. But there would still be nothing inbetween you and the sun, and the nothing would have no temperature.
At the same temperature hot steel feels warmer than hot water, and hot water feels warmer than hot air. You can stay in hot air for a long time, but touch a metal with the same temperature and you instantly feel pain.
That’s because temperature requires molecules and the more there are the more you feel it. Space is mostly empty so there’s not much to heat up.
ElectroMagnetic Radiation.
In space there is no medium for the Specific frequency that is heat (Infra Red) to influence to generate radiant heat.
Until the light hits something, such as the Earth, the Infra Red spectrum radiates the solid structures creating heat.
For a person on a space walk on the ISS, the space suit has to endure positive temperatures from the sun light hitting the suit, causing temperatures of several Hundred degrees, and Negative Several Hundred in shadow.
Latest Answers