Questions tagged [temperature]
Temperature is a measurement of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in an object or system. In simpler words: it's the degree or intensity of heat present in a substance or object that is commonly measured with a thermometer.
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What would happen if an ice cube is left in space?
Recently I boarded a flight and noticed outside air temperature as -53°C at an altitude of 36860ft (11.23km). I don't know what causes such a freezing temperature in that altitude but was wondering ...
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Why is Mars cold?
The surface temperatures of Mars are about -87C to 5C, which is much colder than that of Earth's.
If Mars has 95% carbon dioxide, which is a Greenhouse gas, why is the surface of Mars so cold? ...
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Why didn't the Big Bang produce heavier elements?
Shortly after the Big Bang, temperatures cooled from the Planck temperature. Once temperatures lowered to 116 gigakelvins, nucleosynthesis took place and helium, lithium and trace amounts of other ...
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Could liquid water have existed in open space 15 million years after the Big Bang?
Around 15 million years after the Big Bang, the ambient temperatures was about $24^\circ {\rm C}$, which is in a range where water could be liquid. Could liquid blobs of water be existent then?
PS: I ...
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What is the difference between gas and dust in astronomy?
Is there a strict difference between gas and dust?
In Earthly environment most things become gaseous if heated enough. The temperature of interstellar medium seems to range mostly between 10 and 10 ...
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How was the core temperature of the Sun estimated?
It was estimated that the heat inside the core of the Sun inside around 15 000 000 °C - this value is extremely enormous. How did scientists estimate this value?
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How hot can a planet be?
Given that some exoplanets, particular "Hot Jupiters", orbit very closely to their parent star, how hot can these planets become?
What is the hottest exoplanet discovered so far?
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What is the upper and lower limit of temperatures found on stars?
What are the most extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) stars have been detected at? Is there an upper and lower limit for the detected temperature of stars?
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How cold is interstellar space?
The vastness of space brings me a sense of chilliness even though I have never experienced it, although I wish to. Just how cold is interstellar space (on average)? How is this even measured? I mean ...
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How do stellar temperatures vary?
The temperature of the surface of the Sun (photosphere) is between 4500° - 6000° Kelvin. Inside the core, it's around 15.7 million degrees Kelvin.
In other types of stars (neutron stars, white ...
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Why does lithium fuse at lower temperatures than hydrogen?
This is a basic question, but it's been bugging me. In the Wikipedia article for lithium burning, it states that:
Stars, which by definition must achieve the high temperature (2.5 × 10^6 K) ...
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Is there a limit to how hot a star can be?
I think that size and mass do not correlate to temperature, but then again these factors contribute to the internal pressure.
I would like to know if there is a limit to how hot a star can get and ...
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Is there an O1 or O0 star?
Okay, we've seen the super hot Wolf-Rayet stars, especially WR 102 and 142, and the "slash stars," many of which are early O (O2-4.5/WN). We know the temperatures of these Wolf Rayet stars. ...
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Why is the Sun so bright, but you can feel it far away?
First of all, the Sun's surface temperature is only about 6000 K. Years ago I was working at at a melt work with furnace temperatures 0f about 2-3000 K; of course you could not be near a furnace ...
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Is the Sun hotter today, in terms of absolute temperature (i.e., NOT total luminosity), than it was in the distant past?
I am constantly reading that the Sun is at least 20% 'hotter', in terms of total radiation/luminosity, than it was a few million years after its formation (i.e., after the Hayashi stage...)
But what ...
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Why are there no ISM clouds with temperatures between 100 and 6,000K?
In the interstellar medium, there are several different diffuse phases of gas, distinguished by their density and temperature. Specifically, the cold neutral medium has temperatures from ~50-100 K and ...
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Would Europa be an ocean planet if it were in the habitable zone?
If a Europa-like body were in the Sun's habitable zone, let's say in an orbit between Earth and Mars, would the body become and remain a water ocean planet? In the habitable zone, the Sun would warm ...
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What is the temperature of an accretion disc surrounding a supermassive black hole?
What is the temperature of an accretion disc surrounding a supermassive black hole? Is there plasma in the disc?
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Can Jupiter's nightside be classified as spectral type Y?
As far as I am aware, the latest spectral types that have been assigned are around Y2, for objects like WISE 0855-0714 that have temperatures around 250 K or so. I've also seen several directly-imaged ...
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What is the temperature 55 km beneath the surface of Mars?
What is the temperature 55 km (34.18 miles) beneath the surface of Mars? The reason I ask is that I want to know if it might be habitable for a possible future colony if they could dig that deep (...
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Why is the Boomerang Nebula colder than the CMB?
An earlier answer on temperature mentioned that the temp of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is $2.4\,{\rm K}$ and the temp of the Boomerang nebula as ${\rm 1\,K}$. How did the nebula cool faster ...
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Why is Epsilon Indi Ab 2° Celsius?
I was reading the Wikipedia page for the exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab.
It orbits around its parent star every 173.6 years in a distance of 28.4 AU as provided in the first infobox of the article.
The ...
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Is there a simple way to get $T_{\mathit{eff}}$ estimates for Gaia EDR3?
For just hobbyist purposes (3D starmap) - I'm trying to infer temperature from EDR3 data to make a rough assessment of stellar type.
I tried applying figure 2 from this doc:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1008....
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Will Jupiter eventually stop shrinking?
Jupiter is currently shrinking due to the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism. Will this mechanism eventually hold or getting slower? If so, at what size of Jupiter will it stop and why? If not, what will ...
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Why is the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) so hot, and what is "collisionless shock heating"?
The Phys.org article Researchers find last of universe's missing ordinary matter says:
Ordinary matter, or "baryons," make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of ...
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Temperature of Earth if tidal locked with the Sun?
Assume the Earth somehow stopped spinning once every ~24 hours, and instead started rotating at ~365 days per rotation, so it effectively would end up being tidal locked with the Sun. In this ...
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What is the temperature inside a Black Hole?
Is it insanely hot? Cause of so much gravity?
Is it close to absolute zero? Cause the matter is so closely packed, there is hardly any space for particles to move?
Is it room temperature? Cause Cooper ...
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What is the history of the average pressure, density, and temperature of the matter in the universe over time?
This question is inspired by this more specific question where Cerelic wanted to know if conditions were suitable for liquid water to exist during an epoch when the characteristic temperature of the ...
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Is there a formula for calculating surface temperature of a rocky world based on atmosphere and solar input?
For example, a thicker atmosphere would probably lead to less temperature variation . . . I assume that much is obvious. And, greenhouse gases trap heat.
But when posed with a question like "...
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Exactly how long does it take for the exposed core of a star to cool from its starting temperature (several billion K) to ~50,000 K?
OK, I didn't know how I should word this question. But the basic point is that most white dwarfs that we have classified fall in temperature ranges from ~50,000 K to 6000 K. However, at the end of a ...
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How can there only be "11 phonons" in the mirrors of LIGO interferometers?
LIGO is an incredibly sensitive detector of small changes in space due to the passing of gravitational waves and uses some very high-level mathematics and physics and experimental techniques to drive ...
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What is the RGB curve for blackbodies?
I created a program to convert the temperature (in Kelvin) of a blackbody to RGB color. However, it is slightly inaccurate, and the deviations increase for values greater than 10000K and less than ...
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At high temperatures, do planets glow like blackbodies?
I've been messing around in Universe Sandbox for a while and noticed that as a planet heats up, it glows like a blackbody starting at ~4000 K. Is the simulation here accurate, or do very hot planets ...
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Reason for different surface temperatures of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Indi at similar properties
While looking at a list of nearby stars, I noticed that the spectral classes were not always consistent compared to the masses (and radii) of the main sequence stars. Especially the comparison between ...
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Can we calculate the average temperature of the heliosphere?
It is my understanding that one can measure the temperature of the universe by measuring cosmic microwave background radiation. Could we also use this method for calculating the average temperature of ...
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Temperature gradient in stars
It is a well known fact that in stars, there exists a temperature gradiënt. The
observational reason is because we perceived spectral lines in the otherwise continuous spectrum of a star. If this ...
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How does Io's atmosphere behave locally near volcanic plumes?
Io's surface air pressure is about $0.3 {\rm mPa}$ but Io's atmosphere is strongly variable, depending on whether it's on the near side or far side of Io (relative to Jupiter) and it collapses at ...
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Why would the Chang'e-4 lander find lunar far side temp. "colder than scientists expected", when the LRO has already been taking thermal readings?
In January, the Chinese probe lander Chang'e-4 was was announced to have found temperatures dipping lower on the far side than expected ("Chinese rover finds lunar nights 'colder than expected'" by R. ...
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color of stars and temperature
I recently got questioned on why stars are the color they are. I know the color of a star depends on its surface temperature where hotter stars produce more light towards the blue side of the spectrum ...
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Cooling timescale for an interstellar dust grain
I would like to estimate the cooling timescale for an interstellar dust grain, starting at 200K, down to 100 K.
The equation I have come up with is:
$\displaystyle t_{cooling} = \frac{mC\Delta T}{Q_{...
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Would a high albedo reflective substance cool down Venus?
If we were to put a highly reflective substance into Venus's upper atmosphere, could we cool it down? I am envisioning adding a highly reflective fine dust or gas, possibly lighter than "air" to the ...
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What's the temperature of Pluto's core?
The surface is freezing-nitrogen cold, but it's typical for the temperature to increase towards the core. What's the temperature of the core of Pluto? Is the planet icy and rocky all the way through? ...
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How to Distinguish between Temperature and Doppler effect using Black-body radiation?
I understand that the radiation of a body can be described using the curve for black-body radiation. In the sense that a hotter body will be blue shifted and a cooler body will be red shifted.
The ...
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Why is our Sun hotter than UY Scuti?
As Wikipedia says the surface temperature of UY Scuti is 3,365 K and the sun is 5,778 K
Why is the Sun hotter than a supergiant star like UY Scuti?
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How do we find the exact temperature of a star?
This is a very basic question, but I am a little confused. As far as I know, the temperature of a star is analyzed based on the color of the light it emits. So, if a star is moving away from us, then ...
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How do we define temperature in outer space?
I was recently reading an article on space.com about : What's the Temperature of Outer Space.
They said :
Some parts of space are hot! Gas between stars, as well as the solar wind, both seem to be ...
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Is every single large solid body orbiting entirely outside of the frost line covered in ice?
Not sure where I heard that but I want to make sure if it's true. Forget about the asteroid belt for a minute: Are all the moons of the outer planets and kuiper belt objects covered in water ice?
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Why is Rosetta's Comet so "warm"?
Rosetta Comet AKA 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has the surface temperature range of -43 to -93 degree Celsius.
Now, if we compare that with the Mercury (I chose Mercury cause it's closest to the Sun ...
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Extract surface density profile from a temperature profile?
I have a protoplanetary disk model which outputs a temperature vs. radius profile, based on radiative transfer. Looks something like this...
One of the inputs to the model is the surface density ...
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Why do degenerate objects get hotter as more mass is added?
After reading this question, I decided to post a question about degeneracy. I've seen simulations on large, $15\text{+ }M_J$ objects that are accreting mass. They do not grow in radius, instead they ...
