The Weirdly Nihilistic Reason Why Outer Space Is So Cold

[micropage7]

Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reachers of our galaxy—in the vast nothingness of space—the distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. Temperatures in these vacuous regions can plummet to about -455 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 kelvin). Are you shivering yet?

But why is the vacuum of space this cold? Well, it's complicated.

For physicists, temperature is all about velocity and motion. “When we talk about the temperature in a room, that’s not the way a scientist would talk about it," astronomer Jim Sowell, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, tells Popular Mechanics. “We would use the expression ‘heat’ to define the speeds of all the particles in a given volume.”

Most scientists use the kelvin instead of Fahrenheit to describe extremely cold temperatures, so we'll be doing that here, too.

Most, if not all of the heat in the universe comes from stars like our sun. Inside the sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, temperatures can swell to 15 million kelvin. (On the surface, they only reach up to about 5,800 kelvin.)

The heat that leaves the sun and other stars travels across space as infrared waves of energy called solar radiation. These solar rays only heat the particles in their path, so anything not directly in view of the sun stays cool. Like, really cool.

At night, the surface of even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, drops to about 95 kelvin. Pluto’s surface temperature reaches about 40 kelvin. Coincidentally, the lowest temperature ever recorded in our solar system was clocked much closer to home. Last year, scientists measured the depths of a dark crater on the surface of our moon and found that temperatures dropped to about 33 kelvin, according to New Scientist.

That’s super cold, as in -400 Fahrenheit degrees.

Empty Space?

But our universe is vast—unimaginably vast. (And possibly a loop?) What about the vacuum of space?

Well, that’s where things get tricky. Within near and distant galaxies, the mesh of dust and clouds that weaves between the stars has been observed at temperatures between between 10 and 20 kelvin. The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin.

These temperatures dip perilously close to an elusive measurement: absolute zero. At absolute zero, which to -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit—no motion or heat is transferred between particles, even on the quantum level.

In the vacuum of space, gas particles are few and far between—about one atom per spoonful, or 10 cubic centimeters, according to Quartz—so they aren’t able to readily transfer heat to each other through conduction and convection. Heat in space can only be transferred through radiation, which regulates how particles of light, or photons, are absorbed or emitted, according to UniverseToday.

The farther you travel into interstellar space, the colder it gets. “I don’t know that you’ll ever get down to absolute zero,” Sowell says. “You’re always going to see some light and there’ll be some motion.”

There may be pockets of the universe where temperatures drop to 1 Kelvin above absolute zero, Sowell notes, but so far, the closest measurement to absolute zero has only been observed in laboratories here on Earth.

"Humans are actually pretty good at creating extreme temperatures," Alasdair Gent, a graduate student in astroparticle physics also of the Georgia Institute of Technology, tells Popular Mechanics. Scientists are able to recreate the same temperatures seen in the vacuum of space as well as inside the core of stars like our sun.

Our Protective Atmosphere

Back here on Earth, we have it easy. “You can have high-speed particles zipping by us outside the Earth's atmosphere, but if you took off your space suit, you would feel cold because there aren't that many particles hitting you,” says Sowell. “Here on the surface of the earth, particles aren't moving really fast, but there are zillions of them.”

Earth’s atmosphere does an excellent job of circulating the sun’s heat through conduction, convection and radiation. That’s why we feel temperature changes so acutely on Earth. “The particles are moving just a bit faster due to the sunlight or weather patterns,” says Sowell.

When we venture out past the safety and confines of our planet, we wear spacesuits and travel in spacecraft that help protect us from these extreme temperatures. Here, a large dose of creativity and a whole lot of insulation is critical.

The Apollo-era spacesuits, for example, had heating systems that included flexible coils and lithium batteries. Modern suits come equipped with tiny, microscopic balls of heat-reactant chemicals that helped protect astronauts from the frigid temps.

The Artemis spacesuits, which will take the next man and first woman to the moon in 2024, come equipped with a portable life support system that will help future moonwalkers regulate their temperature on the moon and beyond.

Were you to weave between galaxies in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, the heat from your body—about 100 watts, according to Space.com—would start to radiate away from you because conduction and convection don't work in space. This would be a slow, frigid way to go, and, eventually, you'd freeze to death. But ... it's likely you'd asphyxiate first.

After all, space is all about extremes.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a29895696/how-cold-is-space/

But She is colder than the space

 

[FinneousPJ]

What's the nihilistic reason?

Anyway yeah, the most common tropes of people exploding due to vacuum or freezing almost instantly are both blatantly wrong.

 

[delshay]

They say everything in space will die at some point. Last will be black holes gobbling up what's left, but even black hokes will die. Don't even want to think what the temperature would be like with no stars.

 

[Rei]

My biggest gripes with movies noticeably in Guardians Of The Galaxy series & Avengers: Infinity War is that people near instantaneously freezing in space which won't happen for at least 24-30 hours & that's just the skin, despite space's freezing temp. There is no air nor object for a person to touch to expel heat from the body while radiation is the slowest method to expel heat. In reality, it could take a week to freeze in the way shown in the movies I mentioned.

 

[R-T-B]

What's the nihilistic reason?

Anyway yeah, the most common tropes of people exploding due to vacuum or freezing almost instantly are both blatantly wrong.

Are they? I'm pretty sure you'd freeze quite quickly at nearly absolute zero. Don't know about exploding.

My biggest gripes with movies noticeably in Guardians Of The Galaxy series & Avengers: Infinity War is that people near instantaneously freezing in space which won't happen for at least 24-30 hours & that's just the skin, despite space's freezing temp. There is no air nor object for a person to touch to expel heat from the body while radiation is the slowest method to expel heat. In reality, it could take a week to freeze in they way shown in the movies I mentioned.

Ah. Gotcha.

 

[FinneousPJ]

Are they? I'm pretty sure you'd freeze quite quickly at nearly absolute zero. Don't know about exploding.



Ah. Gotcha.

They are indeed.

 

[mtcn77]

I hate texts without a climax.

 

[Caring1]

Don't know about exploding.

People might not literally explode, but much like the bends, expanding gasses internally would cause serious issues

 

[R-T-B]

People might not literally explode, but much like the bends, expanding gasses internally would cause serious issues

You first. For science!

 

[Space Lynx]

I love the image the mindseye produces when you talk about particles through the sun passing through us, this intrigued me in shows like Cosmos Carl Sagan or when Niel De Grasse Tyson talks about it... how many lenses there to see our existence through, how interesting it is to try on a different pair of glasses and then contemplate our existence.

 

[Rei]

Anyway yeah, the most common tropes of people exploding due to vacuum or freezing almost instantly are both blatantly wrong.

People might not literally explode, but much like the bends, expanding gasses internally would cause serious issues

Forgot to comment this one but people do explode but not like a balloon but more like a bloated paperbag & that's it. It usually happens within 70 seconds & supposedly survivable. The chimps & few dogs did survive the "bloated" pressures of space when the experiment happened in 1965.

 

[R-T-B]

Forgot to comment this one but people do explode but not like a balloon but more like a bloated paperbag & that's it. It usually happens within 70 seconds & supposedly survivable. The chimps & few dogs did survive the "bloated" pressures of space when the experiment happened in 1965.

Weren't the dogs and chimps sent to space pressurized?

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

My biggest gripes with movies noticeably in Guardians Of The Galaxy series & Avengers: Infinity War is that people near instantaneously freezing in space which won't happen for at least 24-30 hours & that's just the skin, despite space's freezing temp. There is no air nor object for a person to touch to expel heat from the body while radiation is the slowest method to expel heat. In reality, it could take a week to freeze in they way shown in the movies I mentioned.

Yep, and likewise there are regions of space with temperatures in thousands if not millions of K, but matter there is so sparse that if you were physically there you would not get burned, since there would not be much heat to transfer.

 

[R-T-B]

Yep, and likewise there are regions of space with temperatures in thousands if not millions of K, but matter there is so sparse that if you were physically there you would not get burned, since there would not be much heat to transfer.

Even the sunside surface of the moon is believed to be around the boiling point of water, due to the fact it's nearly always facing the sun.

It's amazing when you think about it that way that we could go there at all. The spacesuits we developed were technological amazing.

 

[Rei]

Wow, I thought this thread was gonna die. Way to bring back an old thread.

Weren't the dogs and chimps sent to space pressurized?

I don't know about that part. I do not believe it was ever mentioned in the Science Journal magazine that I read a while back.
I imagine they had to be pressurized at first so the animals can get up to space but then prolly unpressurized them or simply exposing them to space momentarily. Man, this was done right before animal rights activist hasn't existed yet or hasn't gained enough exposure or just full of hippies.

 

[Bones]

Even the sunside surface of the moon is believed to be around the boiling point of water, due to the fact it's nearly always facing the sun.

It's amazing when you think about it that way that we could go there at all. The spacesuits we developed were technological amazing.

Actually the moon is tidally locked to the earth so it never spins on it's axis, making a day at any given spot on the moon last for about 2 weeks and night time the same for said spot.
Temp extremes for the moon are as said, perhaps even a little hotter and once that spot has been facing away from the sun it can get pretty chilly too....

Even orbiting spacecraft can experience this "Day and night heating/cooling" with similar extremes seen if the craft isn't spun or rotated.

 

[qubit]

This article makes the same mistake that so many others do: they say that space is cold. It isn't. Space itself, ie the nothing with no matter or light in it, has no temperature, it's temperatureless. It's the contents of that space which have temperature, ie the radiation and/or matter. Put any object in space and heat will radiate from it quite slowly. Therefore, it's not too hard to put a heater in that object to keep it warm in the vacuum of space, for example, an astronaut's space suit.

This is why a thermos flask is so effective at maintaining the temperature of the liquid or solid inside it for hours (whether hot or cold) because it uses the properties of the vacuum to reduce heat loss or gain, to the slowest possible.

 

[pony66]

This article makes the same mistake that so many others do: they say that space is cold. It isn't. Space itself, ie the nothing with no matter or light in it, has no temperature, it's temperatureless. It's the contents of that space which have temperature, ie the radiation and/or matter. Put any object in space and heat will radiate from it quite slowly. Therefore, it's not too hard to put a heater in that object to keep it warm in the vacuum of space, for example, an astronaut's space suit.

This is why a thermos flask is so effective at maintaining the temperature of the liquid or solid inside it for hours (whether hot or cold) because it uses the properties of the vacuum to reduce heat loss or gain, to the slowest possible.

Can you prove there's actually space and that it's not all dark matter,

Who thinks a black hole is nothing, a tear in the fabric, and who thinks it's a mass left over of dense matter like what you'd see on mass effect, lol, ?

 

[R-T-B]

Can you prove there's actually space and that it's not all dark matter,

Space isn't. There's nothing to prove is there. It's vacuum.

And if there is dark matter, it exists outside our measurable principles thus far, so no proving it.

 

[pony66]

Space isn't. There's nothing to prove is there. It's vacuum.

And if there is dark matter, it exists outside our measurable principles thus far, so no proving it.

I'd say depends, some say space is nothing an some say it's an entity.

 

[R-T-B]

I'd say depends, some say space is nothing an some say it's an entity.

In modern science we don't defer to "some say" as a point of reference.

 

[qubit]

@odiebugs66 ditto what @R-T-B said.

 

[oobymach]

Space is merely a void into which we are traveling, we know nothing about it save for what we can reference from our tiny point of observation. We may well be creating it ourselves with the LHC (A.L.I.C.E. - A Linear Ion Collider Experiment, Alice down the rabbit hole), space may merely be a room (cooled with liquid nitrogen and vacuumed) on a small planet and the universe may simply be an experiment performed by a group of scientists, galaxies mere nucleons creating miniature versions of themselves when they are broken in high speed collisions.

Space isn't completely empty, there are many many asteroids orbiting every planet and star of all shapes and sizes, and in the void between stars there is also debris from prehistoric collisions in space.

Spaceweather is a good site for things like by the minute solar wind monitoring (solar wind is what makes earth feel hot on a hot day, not fucking C02), how radioactive airline flights are daily and near earth asteroids.

SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

 

[Vya Domus]

And if there is dark matter, it exists outside our measurable principles thus far, so no proving it.

They did measure it, that's how we know it exists. They looked at the movement and gravitational pull of galaxies and realized that their mass could not account for all the forces involved.

And it exerts negative pressure basically, it's the "force" of the vacuum pushing ordinary matter apart.

 

[R-T-B]

They did measure it, that's how we know it exists.

We know there's something (a force) we're not accounting for, that's far from proving the existence of a new form of matter.