…in what proximity would you have to be to the sun and how fast would you have to be spinning (like a rotisserie chicken) so that your light side didn’t burn and your dark side didn’t freeze; rotating just enough to keep a relatively stable temperature?
Absolutely absurd, I know but this question somehow popped into my head and won’t leave. 😆🐔🔥🧊
Probably significantly further away than the earth’s orbit, given that (1) you can die of heatstroke from exposure to the sun at earth’s surface, and that’s with miles of air still absorbing much of the radiation; and (2) in the vacuum of space, there would be no air or other substances to conduct away your body heat, so you’d have to rely solely on radiative heat to cool off.
So even though its minus hundreds of degrees, your skin wouldn’t freeze instantly on your dark side in this situation?
It’s not minus hundreds of degrees, it’s body temperature. Vacuum has no temperature, and it’s an insulator, not a conductor.
That makes perfect sense to me on paper. It still makes my head spin thinking about though lol
I think part of the unintuitiveness is caused by our knowledge that things quickly freeze in space.
Freezing is produced by a combination of temperature and pressure, but because the former fluctuates a lot more than the latter in our daily experience, the role of pressure isn’t part of our intuition. But in a vacuum, things freeze even at relatively high temperatures.
Yep, in space, getting rid of excess heat is a much harder problem than you’d think, because radiation is a lot less efficient compared to convection (distribution of heat through movement of fluid like air or water).