AaS! 195: How Cold Can Space Get?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What’s the temperature of deep space? Can it get any colder than that? How do we even define temperature when there’s nothing around? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Folks, it's really, really, really cold out there.
0:12.5	I mean really cold.
0:14.3	Don't forget your jacket.
0:16.7	Kind of cold.
0:18.1	Here on the surface of the Earth, though, it's warm, and we can thank three sources
0:23.9	of heat for that warmth. One, we have the sun. You may have noticed. It comes around every single
0:29.6	day. The sun is a giant thermonuclear bomb going off all the time, releasing quite a bit of
0:37.2	energy. Some of that energy intersects the
0:39.8	surface of the Earth and keeps us warm. But that's not the only thing. Like you can't have
0:44.2	volcanoes or plate tectonics with just solar heating. You need something else. We have heat
0:51.1	internal to the planet Earth itself.
0:54.6	Some of that heat, about half of our own internal heat, comes from our own formation.
1:00.2	The planet Earth right now is a solid ball of rock that is relatively compact and does not take up a lot of space.
1:08.0	But it wasn't always like that.
1:14.7	Billions of years ago, all the little particles and elements and molecules that now make up the Earth were scattered around inside of a giant
1:20.0	protoplanetary disk, a big nebula. And all that material to make the Earth had to squeeze down
1:26.4	into a very tiny volume to become
1:28.3	the Earth.
1:29.3	And as they did that, all those little molecules rubbed up against each other and struck each other
1:34.3	and that generated heat.
1:36.3	And the solid body of the Earth retains that heat even today, billions of years later.
1:43.3	Smaller planets like Mars have cooled off. They've lost their
	...

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