Friday 18 January 2013

Hot and Cold

 Ok so it’s a little bit cold out.

No I’m not talking about the few flakes of snow currently falling on the UK. I mean out in Space.

Below is a chart of the temperature in Space throughout our Solar System.



Closest in to the Sun, Mercury is one of the hottest and coldest places in the Solar System. It has a dayside temp in excess of 400C, with its night-side can be as low as -200C.

Although the temperature of the space around Venus is about 55C which would allow liquid water (and thus possibly life), it’s thick green-house atmosphere drives it’s surface to around 186C.

We like to think of Earth as a temperate world, and fortunately closer to the bottom range of temperatures that allows liquid water. The hottest recorded temp was 71C(!) in the Lut Desert of Iran and the cold being -89C...of course in Antarctica. This would be colder than Mars and lower than the freezing point of CO2 (dry ice).

Out beyond Mars and the Asteroid belt, space temp starts to become a challenge for spacecraft. Normally their systems would literally freeze up well before they’d reach Jupiter, so they carry isotropic heaters to ensure they keep on working.

Passed Jupiter and it really starts to get chilly! Oxygen liquefies as we pass Saturn and Nitrogen not long after. After Uranus Oxygen & Nitrogen (Air!) actually freezes.

Pluto and Eris (dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt) are a mind numbing -229C & -231C respectively.

Further out, we really reach the vast coldness of space between stars at -250C.

But only in the dark of the emptiness between Galaxies do we find the coldest parts of the Universe, hovering just above Absolute Zero, around 3K, or -270C.

So when you look out the window at the snow, maybe it’s time to just put another jumper on!

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