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Originally posted by fiftyfifty
ok.. but how cold? Is there a 'standard' coldness like with light, theres a limit to how dark it can be. Brightness can go up and up but darkness can only go as dark as pitch black. temperature can go either way infinitely theoretically right?
In the abscence of a heat source such as the sun I believe the temperature of space would approach absolute zero.
Originally posted by fiftyfifty
It's a question i can't find an answer to. As there is no air in space to be tempered what would the outside temperature be just out of earths atmosphere or on the moon. Would it be below freezing or would it be mega hot because there is no protection from the sun. Either way im guessing it cant be too extreme?
Originally posted by johnsky
If you were to take a temperature reading in space, the only thing you'd be measuring is the temperature of the thermometer itself, or whatever object it is connected to.
en.wikipedia.org...
Temperature of the vacuum
The temperature of an object is proportional to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in it. In a pure vacuum, there are no molecules. There is nothing to measure the kinetic energy of, and temperature is undefined. If a thermometer were placed in a vacuum, the reading would be a measurement of the internal temperature of the thermometer, not of the vacuum which surrounds it.
All objects emit black body radiation. Over time, a thermometer in a pure vacuum will radiate away thermal energy, decreasing in temperature indefinitely until it reaches the zero-point energy limit.
In practice, there is no such thing as a pure vacuum since there will always be photons associated with the black body radiation of the walls of the vacuum. A thermometer orbiting the Earth can easily absorb energy from sunlight faster than it can radiate it away. This can lead to a dramatic temperature increase.
A thermometer isolated from solar radiation (in the shade of a larger body, for example) is still exposed to Cosmic microwave background radiation. In this case, the temperature will change until the rate of energy loss and gain are in equilibrium. At this point, the thermometer will have a temperature of 2.725 K, which is often referred to as the temperature of space.
Originally posted by fiftyfifty
It's a question i can't find an answer to. As there is no air in space to be tempered what would the outside temperature be just out of earths atmosphere or on the moon. Would it be below freezing or would it be mega hot because there is no protection from the sun. Either way im guessing it cant be too extreme?
Originally posted by fiftyfifty
It's a question i can't find an answer to. As there is no air in space to be tempered what would the outside temperature be just out of earths atmosphere or on the moon. Would it be below freezing or would it be mega hot because there is no protection from the sun. Either way im guessing it cant be too extreme?