: Why do they say the area around the sun is hotter than the surface itself, it doesn’t make any sense.

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How can the empty space around the sun be millions of degrees hot and the surface only thousands ? it doesn’t make any sense.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

ºC has the molecules move at an avarage speed of 475m/s, that’s pretty fast, increase the avarage speed and you get a hotter gas. if put your hand in that cloud of gas and your hand is colder than it, the molecules will bump ino the molecules that make up your arm transferring energy which will in term make your molecules average speed higher making it hotter, now solid’s molecules aren’t free to fly around, you could say that they vibrate in place but the principle is the same.

At very low gas densities near vacuum the molecules are free to fly round at very very high speeds very rarely bumping into each other If you were to measure their average speed you will find it’s very high, so you say “this gas is several thousands of degrees hot” but if you were to put your hand in it altho the collisions in your arm would transfer a lot of energy to heat up your arm, there is way to few collisions to actually heat up your arm before you radiate all that heat away and end up freezing.

soo yes the sun’s corona is technically extremely hot because the average speed of the gas molecules is extremely high but it’s so low density that it can’t actually heat anything up because objects would radiate heat away more quickly than they would gain it.

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