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It’s not unusual for things to be randomly traveling through space really fast: space is full of stuff taking forever to go from nowhere to nowhere through nothing at break-neck speeds. Typically: they’re very random and very fast, so the temperature of those gases is thousands of degrees Celsius (or Kelvin or Fahrenheit for that matter). In order to define a temperature you look at lots of atoms passing through a region and see how random those trajectories are. In deep space you mostly find individual atoms cruising along at high speeds.
The air molecules in a hot air balloon move fast (relative to each other) and the bits of ice in the comet moves slowly (relative to each other). A comet moves faster than air molecules (on average), but it’s still frozen solid because all of its molecules are moving in more-or-less the same direction.
Temperature is the random movement of molecules. (left) a hot air balloon and (right) an artist’s interpretation of a comet. Its atoms are all moving really fast, but they’re all moving together.
However, it’s frozen because that movement isn’t random. Air bounces around so much that it doesn’t get very far (about 1 ten millionth of a meter before it gets bounced), but it’s all still moving pretty fast.īy comparison, Halley’s comet is moving at a few dozen km/s (it varies between about 1 km/s and 50 km/s). For example, the air you’re (hopefully) breathing isn’t sitting still, it’s moving every-which-way at around half a km per second. Temperature is a measure of the average random speed of a material (technically, it’s the “variance” of the velocities). Really, if you’re going to travel in space at all, bring a spacesuit. The same thing is true for gases in space: it’s hot, but there’s so little of it you’d never notice.įor example, in the core of the Orion Nebula the temperature of the gas is around 10,000K, but even if you were there your biggest problem wouldn’t be getting burned, it would be freezing to death. Sure it’s hot, but there’s so little of it that there isn’t enough heat to light things on fire.