How Cold is Space? All about Space Temperature
Summary – How cold is space? Space is all vacuum but
could vacuum have a temperature of absolute zero? Let's check it out:
Space is cold, yes, but how cold is space?
And is it cold all over? What about places closer to
Sun? What about the outskirts of our solar system? What's the space
temperature? Let's answer all these questions in this post.
Space is almost a vacuum even though it has some
particles or molecules flying about. But predominantly, it's close to being a
total vacuum. In vacuum, unlike elsewhere like the earth (with an atmosphere),
heat has only one way of traveling around: radiation. If objects came into contact,
conduction can take place and heat can get transferred but other than that,
radiation is the only way heat travels around.
Space behaves much like how earth reacts to sunlight
and the absence of sunlight. During the day, temperatures rise and during the
night, temperatures drop. In space though, there is no real concept of day and
night. There's the sun-facing side and then there's the side that doesn't “see”
the sun.
An object – like an astronaut – who faces the sun,
would be served temperatures of up to 115° Celsius. The other side of this, say
when the astronaut is behind the earth (sun hidden from view), we would find
temperatures of about -270°C.
That's the amount of temperature difference one gets to
experience in space.
A pan of hot pizzas won't lose much heat in space and
would remain hot for a longer period of time than if you left them on your
table here on Earth. That's because those delicious hot pizzas don't have any
means to lose heat other than through radiation – and that's pretty slow for
pizzas.
On Earth, conduction takes away a lot of heat because the air interacts
with the pizzas.
The ISS doing orbits over Earth faces extremes of
temperatures every day. As it cruises through space around Earth, the surfaces
are exposed to temperatures that range from hundreds of degress Celsius on the
positive scale to near absolute zero (-270°C).
Scientists generally consider the average temperate of
space to be about 2.725 Kelvin – that's near absolute zero. At this
temperature, molecules move about extremely slowly unless they interact with
other particles or molecules or forces like gravitation.
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