Why is space so cold despite the blazing heat of the sun?
Arab Weather - The space environment is characterized by the presence of great temperature variations, unlike our moderate habitat here on Earth, the sun is a mass of gas and fire, the temperature in its center reaches 15 million degrees Celsius, and 56 thousand degrees Celsius on its surface, while the temperature of space reaches far away For the Earth's temperate atmosphere, to 270 degrees below zero degrees Celsius, how can space be so cold if the sun is so hot?
Heat transfer in space
Heat moves in space by radiation, and it is a wave of infrared energy that travels from hotter bodies to cooler ones, and radiation waves excite particles that come into contact with them, which leads to their heating, and this is how heat is transferred from the sun to the earth, i.e. The radiation only heats the particles and materials in its direct path , and everything else remains cold. For example, Mercury can have a temperature of 538 degrees lower during the night than during the day when the planet is facing solar radiation.
Heat transfer to Earth
On Earth, there is no such difference in temperature so that the air around you remains warm even if you are in the shade, or even in some seasons, or at night, this great temperature difference does not occur, because heat travels through our planet in three ways Instead of one method, which is: conduction , convection, and radiation , when the sun's radiation strikes the particles in our atmosphere and heats up, that additional energy passes to the molecules around them, and then these particles collide with other neighboring molecules and heat them up, this heat transfer from molecule to molecule is called Conduction molecule, which is a chain reaction that heats areas outside the path of solar radiation.
Cause space is cold
Most of the space is empty, as the gas molecules in space are so few and far from each other that they do not collide regularly with each other, so even when the sun heats them with infrared waves, this heat transfer through conduction is not possible. Likewise, the convection through which heat travels on Earth through currents and in the presence of gravity, does not occur in space that does not contain Earth's gravity.
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