Things on Earth being ‘As hot as the sun’

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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 🙂

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29 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Going to reinterpret your question as being just ‘very hot’. In order to melt something you need for it to transfer heat to said other things. If, for instance, you have a thin wire inside a glass bulb that is near vacuum or filled with a very low pressure inert gas, and you run an electrical current through that wire, it will get hot enough to glow, such that the electrical energy input is the same as the heat and light output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

You an also have very things very hot that have very small mass, like a plasma encased in magnetic fields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductively_coupled_plasma

Other possibilities are that it’s only that hot for a very short time, like a bolt of lightning or a spark from a spark plug. So we’re not talking about taking, for instance, a huge chunk of magma and getting it even hotter.

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