Like i understand there isn’t a lot of things for the heat from Stars to bounce off of but what causes Space itself to be cold? Is it naturally always cold and if so why?
In: Planetary Science
Heat is transfered via infrared radiation. However it needs matter to absorb heat and matter is very scarsed. Emptiness by itself has nothing to produce heat and thus it is cold.
If we look at individual onjects then depending on their position they may absorb a lot of infrared radiation. Eg space stations are very hot on one side and very cold on other.
Space is very hot, it’s just very empty!
Did you every notice how metal feels colder than wood? Even if they are the same temperature? That’s because the metal is heavier or denser, so there’s more of it in one place.
Sincer there’s more stuff in one place, when you touch it more of your body heat can move into it at a time, making it feel colder. In the same way, space is very empty, so even if it’s really hot, there’s so little of it that you barely notice. Is like a single misty drop of rain, it can’t really get you wet
Space is cold because it’s mostly empty, and there isn’t anything to hold or trap heat like there is on Earth. On Earth, the air and other materials can hold and spread heat around, but in space, there’s almost no air or anything else to do that.
Here’s a simple way to think about it: Imagine you’re outside on a really clear night. Without clouds or anything around, it feels colder because there’s nothing to keep the heat in. In space, it’s even more extreme because it’s almost completely empty, so the heat from the Sun can’t spread around very well.
Also, space doesn’t have a temperature in the usual way we think about it because it’s a vacuum (an area with very few particles). Instead, the temperature of objects in space depends on how much sunlight they’re getting. For example, the side of a spaceship facing the Sun can get very hot, while the side facing away can be extremely cold. So, in general, space is cold because it doesn’t have anything to keep the heat around!
Cold is the absence of energy, and it’s perceived because that energy that you have that’s generating heat dissipates to attempt to even out that energy level between you and the things with less energy. There are factors like conductivity, pressure, etc, but in simplest terms, almost anything has more energy than the vacuum of space, so that energy disperses into space, so space is very cold.
Temperature is a measurement of the average motion of particles in a given volume. Space is a vacuum which means there’s very few particles in a given volume. Even if all of the particles in a given region of space have maximum movement the average across the volume is extremely low because the density of the particles is so low.
It’s not really that space is cold. It’s that space is empty and it cannot have temperature if it is empty.
Additionally, if you could instantly transport yourself into space right now and didn’t have to worry about breathing, you wouldn’t feel cold at all. You will actually overheat because the lack of particles would mean that the heat generated by your body would have almost nowhere to go.
Things naturally have no heat, which would be cold to us. Heat will keep moving unless it gets stuck in something, like a planet or a person. Space is nothing, so it can’t trap heat. Because it can’t trap heat, it is cold.
I think you may misunderstand cold.
Cold is not a thing. Really there is no such as cold.
There is the empty state of the universe, and objects in the universe can be warm. But the universe doesn’t get cold.
But more than that, warm objects in the universe don’t become cold, they just loose heat.
The more they loose heat, the closer they get to the default state if the universe.
To put it simply, there is no such thing as cold.
Cold is just the absence of heat.
Space is empty. If there’s nothing to heat, there is no heat. Thus, it’s cold.
Space isn’t quite truly empty tho, there’s small amounts of matter zipping about, so “empty space” has an average temperature of 3 ish kelvin, just barely above absolute zero.
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