How is possible for lightning to be 5 times hotter than the Sun?
In: Planetary Science
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.
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