So, Yesterday I was having my tea and that was pretty hot, it burned my tongue and that gave me a thought. Even though my tea was pretty hot but it’s not the hottest thing in the universe.
So, what do I mean?
We know there is an absolute zero(-273°C). That is the coldest we can get. It is the coldest because we can’t get anything to cool down more than that. At -273°C, theoretically at least it will be so cold that an atom will disappear from existence but is there a point of absolute heat as well?
At which point something is so hot that it can’t get any hotter? Let’s warm up a little more to find out. To understand this let’s start with the human body. You might think that you know your internal temperature. But your internal temperature is not constant. 37 degrees 98.6 fahrenheit, sure, but those are averages. Your internal body temperature fluctuates about one degree Fahrenheit and half a degree Celsius throughout the day in a cycle. Assuming you sleep at night, at 4:30 in the morning, your body reaches its coolest and healthiest natural temperature and at 7:00 pm it reaches its highest temperature. But getting too hot isn’t so good too. A dangerous fever is really bad and 108 degrees Fahrenheit is almost always lethal.
The highest recorded air temperature on Earth has occurred four times. times in Death Valley where it has reached 134.1 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 °C).
180 degrees Fahrenheit is the recommended temperature for water when making coffee and 210 degrees Fahrenheit makes a cake.
2,000 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature of lava fresh from the ground but Come on, nowadays you can make your own lava in your backyard like the guys who own a Fresnel lens and melt whatever they want. They use Fresnel lenses to focus the sun’s energy on whatever they want.
This is a small piece of obsidian volcanic glass that you can melt into real lava right in your backyard if you want. But keep in mind that the sun is having that effect even though it’s 93 million miles from Earth.
Right on the surface of the Sun, is a different story: the surface registers 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the center where the fusion occurs is ridiculous. Temperatures there reach 28 million degrees Fahrenheit, which is also known as 15 million kelvins.
The Kelvin scale has units that are the same size as a degree Celsius but is an absolute scale where zero is absolute zero when matter reaches temperatures as high as those found at the center of the sun releasing an enormous amount of energy irradiated away. If you were to heat just the head of a pin to the temperature of the center of the sun, it would kill anyone within a 1,000-mile radius of it, speaking of which the energy emitted by an object often tells us a lot about the temperature of that object. Any object above absolute zero emits some type of electromagnetic radiation, you and I do not shine visibly, but we do emit infrared light, we cannot see it, but an infrared camera can.
If you want something to be the right temperature to glow in the visible spectrum, you’ll have to reach the Draper Point (the temperature at which most solid materials will begin to glow.), about 798 kelvin (525 degrees Celsius). At this point almost any object will begin to glow a faint red color, we can calculate the expected wavelength of radiation coming out of an object due to its temperature and that wavelength gets smaller and smaller the hotter the object gets, it goes from radio waves to microwaves up to infrared to visible all the way to X-rays and gamma rays that are created in the center of our sun. At temperatures as high as that of the sun matter exists in a fourth state, not solid, liquid, or gas, but a state in which the electrons wander away from the from the nuclei, “Plasma”. If you’ve seen some of those TikTok videos you might know you can make plasma with microwave fire, but don’t do it.
Plus, our sun isn’t even close to being the hottest thing in the universe, I mean sure, 15 million kelvin. It’s quite incredible, but the peak temperature reached during a thermonuclear explosion is 350 million Kelvin, which hardly counts because the temperature is reached very briefly. But inside the core of a star eight times larger than our sun on the last day of its life when it collapses on itself you would reach a temperature of 3 billion kelvin or if you want to be cool 3 giga kelvin. But let’s get even hotter at 1 tera Kelvin things get Weird.
Remember that plasma that we were talking about that the sun is made of Well, at 1 TeraKelvin (1,000,000,000,000 K), the electrons aren’t the only thing that wander away. the hadrons themselves the protons and neutrons in the nucleus merge into quarks and gluons a kind of soup but how hot is a TeraKelvin?
Well Frighteningly Hot.
There is a star called WR 104 about 8,000 light years away from us and its mass is the equivalent of 25 of our suns. But when it dies, when it collapses, its internal temperature will be so great that the energy emitted by gamma radiation that it throws into space will be stronger than the entire amount of energy from our sun will ever create in its entire lifetime.
Gamma-ray bursts are pretty narrow, so the Earth is probably safe, but what if it wasn’t okay? When WR 104 collapses, even though Earth is 4,702 trillion miles away, the energy it releases would still be a bad news story. Exposure for 10 seconds would mean losing a quarter of the Earth’s ozone layer, leading to mass extinction, depletion of the food chain, and starvation, from 8,000 light years away.
Closer to home, right here on Earth, in Switzerland, scientists have been able to smash protons into nuclei, resulting in much higher temperatures. more than one teraKalvin. They have been able to reach the range of 2 to 13 ExaKelvin. But we are fine because those temperatures last for an incredibly brief moment and only involve a small number of particles.
Remember how we could calculate the wavelength of the radiation emitted by an object Depending on its temperature if an object reached a temperature of 1.41 × 1032 Kelvin, the radiation it would admit would have a wavelength of 1.616 × 10-26 nanometers (O.00000000000000000000000001616 nano meters!), which is tiny, so tiny that it actually has a special name. It is the Planck distance, which according to quantum mechanics, is the shortest possible distance in our universe.
Well, what would happen if we added even more energy? Wouldn’t the wavelength be reduced as it’s supposed to be, but it still can’t? This is where we have a problem, above 11.41 × 1032 Kelvin the temperature, the Planck Temperature our theories do not work. The object would become hotter than the temperature. It would be so hot that what it would not be considered a temperature in theory. There is no limit to the amount of energy we could continue to add to the system we just don’t know what would happen if it got hotter than the Planck Temperature.
Classically one could argue that so much energy in one place would instantly cause the formation of a black hole and a black hole formed from energy has a special name, Kugelblitz.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that when you want to tell someone you like that you think they’re so sexy that not even science can understand it, just call them Kugelblitz😉.
Here’s something fun:
The Sun is about 4.7 billion years old about halfway through its life cycle. And so far it has burned through 100 Earths worth of fuel, which seems like a lot, but the Sun is the size of 300,000 Earths. Because of that discrepancy, you could have a lot of mathematical fun comparing your energy output to the sun’s. The sun is way hotter than us and puts out more energy than we do. And although it doesn’t really mean anything, it is. It’s technically true, due to the enormous size of the sun, that a cubic centimeter of a human being emits more energy than an average cubic centimeter of the sun, which should make you feel pretty warm inside. Right?
