How Cold Is Space Reddit

This question was originally answered on quora by c stuart hardwick.

How cold is space reddit. It s only when you put a thing in space like a rock or an astronaut that you can measure temperature. If space is freezing then why don t satellites or the international space station freeze. There is not much in space to absorb the heat radiating from the sun so it just passes on by. That s a nonsense question.

The atoms in space do have a temperature themselves and that temperature is very low roughly 2 7 kelvin or 454 fahrenheit. Apparently this is a question people ask and they don t like it when you make fun of them. Empty space has no temperature. However if you were to leave an object somewhere in deep space far from any stars planets or other bodies it will eventually come into thermal equilibrium with.

But space is empty as well. It s about 3 kelvin or 270 degrees celsius or 455 degrees fahrenheit. You need a colder matter to exchange energy. Click to share on reddit opens.

On earth you warm up either air or water which is denser so you get colder earlier. Every object at a given temperature will radiate energy heat in the form of electromagnetic waves photons due to spontaneous emission the power of the emitted heat radiation follows the stefan boltzmann law and is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That s the average temperature across all of space. Solid objects get cold in space assuming ideal vacuum only by radiation loss.

That s not to say every atom in space has a temperature of 2 7 k. The space has a temperature of 2 7 kelvin. The same phenomenon also works in reverse that is. When i watch some scifi movie where an astronaut gets off his spacesuit he immediatelly freezes to ice.

Space is cold in the sense that it s big and empty and any object placed in space can radiate a limitless amount of energy in all directions so if there is no sun nearby to warm it up it will. So very cold is the answer.