How is possible for lightning to be 5 times hotter than the Sun?
In: Planetary Science
Because of our atmosphere. Air gets very hot very quickly, which makes the lighting hotter as it’s going through it at a very quick speed. The Sun has an atmosphere, but not in the sense of having breathable air, etc, they sort of all just combine together.
Also, the core of the Sun is around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, so it is only the most outer part that is around 10,000 degrees
The sun’s surface isn’t that hot, all things considered. The heat is generated at the center, so if the sun is your oven its surface is the outside. That heat has to pass through an awful lot of gas before it can reach the surface, and once it does it’s pretty much instantly packed and shipped off into space, so the surface never has a chance to heat up more.
Meanwhile lightning is a huge amount of energy dumped into a fairly small bit of air. It’s not that hard to get something really really hot as long as it’s very short-lived and small.
It’s the difference between temperature and heat. Temperature is a measure of the average amount of energy; heat is a measure of the total amount of energy.
Lightning has an average energy (temperature) that’s 5 times the sun. But the total energy in lightning is tiny. So the amount of heat given off by lightning is small and quickly dissipates.
Five times hotter than the surface of the Sun; the centre of the Sun is about 500x hotter than lightning!
The edges of the sun are the least dense bit – fusion occurs in the centre, and the energy takes tens of thousands of years (spreading out in all directions) before it reaches the surface of the Sun.
It’s hotter than the surface, but not the core where the fusion is taking place. Lighting is lots of electrons rushing really fast and heating up the air. But fusion is atoms being smushed together so hard they become 1 atom and some of the excess mass is coming off as energy.
If you’re asking why it doesn’t cook us, it’s because it’s comparatively infinitesimal and short-lived.
lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun, but not the core of the sun. The core of the sun is 27 million degrees F.
And heat is just a measurement of average energy. Lightning is very intense, but also very short lived. As you get further away from the core of the sun, it becomes less dense, and has less energy (and less heat)
The same way a grape can be 5x sweeter than a watermelon. The watermelon has much more sugar than the grape but the watermelon is less concentrated.
There is a difference between heat and temperature. Temperature is essentially the average kinetic energy in a substance, heat is the total amount.
So while the sun has much more heat…lightning affects a very small amount of air. So that smaller amount of heat is distributed to fewer particles.
The sun is a 20 ton slab of concrete smacking you.
Lightning is a 20 ton *needle* coming at you.
Needle = energy focused at one point.
That is to say, the key to it all is how incredibly short-lived and instant lightning strikes are. It’s a lot of energy packed into one small place. More sigifigantly, all that energy is dispersed over *an extremely short time*.
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