How is possible for lightning to be 5 times hotter than the Sun?
In: Planetary Science
Mantis shrimp can generate temperatures as hot as suns surface. So it’s not surprising. Also humans can easily generate temperatures hotter than Suns core
We generate hotter things than the surface of the sun all the time! A welding torch gets way hotter than the surface of the sun, even 10 times hotter.
As stars go, our sun is a pretty cold one. The coldest stars that can achieve fusion are around 3,500 degrees and the hottest are around 25,000, and our sun sits at 5,500. Definitely at the cool end of the spectrum.
Well, I mean, the sun’s not *that* hot. I mean, it’s a star, obviously, and its core temperature is like 15 million degrees. But in terms of the highest measurable temperatures, that’s nothing. The hottest known phenomenon anywhere in the universe actually occurs in Switzerland. Experiments in the Large Hadron Collider can reach like 5 trillion degrees C.
Stars are hot, and they’re remarkably big and remarkably long-lived. But they’re a long, long way from being the hottest phenomenon that exists.
The surface of the sun isn’t actually all that hot. Around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the center of the sun? We’re talking in the tens of millions of degrees.
Ever seen someone use a cutting torch on metal? I’ve got one out in my shed. That will get to about 6,600 degrees F.
You can imagine the sun as a hot object. You know like when you heat metal, the hotter it is, the more white it glows? the sun is like very hot metal. This glowing is called „black body radiation“ and everything has one. Most objects around you are so cool that your eyes cannot see them but an infrared camera can. Now LEDs are different. They do not „glow“ like a lightbulb or the sun, but rather create a peculiar spectrum from electron emission. So giving those lights a „temperature“ is kind of wrong. You just name the heat of an equivalent hot object with the color you want to describe, but the LED is still rather cool. This is also why it uses less energy than a lightbulb of the same color.
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