I’ve heard a few times now in various scientific fields, mainly experiments, about things getting as hot as the sun.
How is this possible? Surely if you do something and you create heat that is that hot it would melt anything surrounding it?
Would love to know how this works 🙂
In: 175
The surface of the sun is the coldest part of it, and those temperatures can be pretty easily reached by an electric arc.
If you’re not heating very much matter up, you can reach extremely high temperatures without a lot of actual heat. How hot something feels is more about the quantity of heat entering your body than about what temperature the thing you’re touching is. If you touch aluminum foil right out of the oven, you don’t get burned because your fingers have a whole lot more thermal mass than the foil does, so the foil cools down much faster than your fingers heat up.
If we go back to electric arcs for a moment, some welding machines use a piece of tungsten as an electrode, even if the arc temperature is double the melting point of the tungsten, you can keep it intact by cooling it down while the arc is lit, some torches even have water cooling.
The highest temperatures we know about are in particle accelerators, like the LHC. Remember that temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy, and we can get these particles very close to the speed of light. Nothing in the sun is moving that fast, even in the core, so the temperature is lower, even though there’s vastly more actual heat, it’s just spread out over a lot more matter.
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