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
Isn’t a thermonuclear explosion about 19 million degrees for just an instant until it dissipates?
Put a baking pan and a sheet of foil in your oven at 400 for 10 minutes. Then pick up both with your bare hands. One will badly burn you and one won’t. Even though they’re the same temperature, one has a LOT more actual heat energy
Try it this way. Comparing to the sun doesn’t account for scale. Imagine using nothing but a match to cook a turkey.
We can heat water to boiling point, yet the oceans aren’t vaporizing
on the same way, we can heat plasma by millions of degrees, yet we are not setting the world on fire, indeed by being so tenuous and such small quantity the plasma we heat would be harmless if it escaped
so basically you can use a minimum amount of energy to concentrate into very high temperature
the total amount of energy matters, the sun generates a huge amount of energy and if we did generate such amount of energy on earth we would be a star
The surface of the Sun is only about 5500°C. Now that’s very hot, but not unachievable here on Earth. If you were to heat something up that much, it would glow the exact same color as the sun because of the way incandescence works.
The filament of an incandescent light bulb, for example, gets to about 2550°C and they were invented nearly 150 years ago.
The thing is the thing we get that hot are small compared to the Sun, and they have a low capacity for heat, so while it’s a very high temperature, it’s not that much energy, so when that heat leaks into the environment, it dissipates rather quickly.
Actually an electric arc is hotter than the surface of the sun. So when an outlet melts or you see a spark and metals are instantly vaporized and molten, remember the flash burn can blind you, cook you, and send so much energy into the air that the air itself becomes conductive.
The tomato in a toasted sandwich is hotter then surface of the sun. Or the contents of party pies at any Australian children’s party.
Tell me I’m wrong
Lightning is 5 times hotter than the Sun. The shockwave that creates in that brief moment, is what you hear as thunder.
If your substance is hot, but not very dense, it doesn’t have that much heat energy. As an example, you can pass your hand through a yellow flame quickly and it won’t burn you because there isn’t much hot gas in the flame, even though it’s at several hundred degrees. Conversely, a stream of water at 90 deg C is burning you instantly when you pass your hand through it.
We have a plasma machine at work that does 100 million degrees, but there is only a few grams of fuel in there total. It is also held away from the walls with magnets.
They use the principles in a Magnetic Bottle. The basic idea here:
Latest Answers