– Space is a vacuum with zero atmosphere, so heat does not transfer well. Could we get really close to the sun because of that?

Question

– Space is a vacuum with zero atmosphere, so heat does not transfer well. Could we get really close to the sun because of that?

In: 4

Answer 1

The planet Mercury is close-ish to the Sun (about 0.387AU, where the Earth is 1AU) and doesn’t have a horrendously thick atmosphere like Venus does. Yet it still has a surface temperature of 427C at high noon. So things still get hot even with only radiation to worry about.