• Question: when u reacreat the suns climate wont everything burn and melt if not why?

    Asked by waltersroberts to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Sometimes you hear that colliding high-energy protons you reach enormous temperatures, hotter than the sun, so the obvious question is why not everything melts? well, the point is that even if temperature is very high, it is localised to a very small region of space. Overall what matters is heat, not temperature, and the heat exchanged by two colliding protons is just a few calories; only that they are concentrated into two particles, instead of being spread between billions and billions of them as it often happens.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      If we ever create the suns climate it would be on a much, much smaller scale and really well contained.

    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      When we collide protons together inside the LHC we can create temperatures 100000 times hotter than the middle of the sun, but there is only a very very small place (volume) where the temperature is this hot, a place smaller than an atom. So although the temperature is really high, the total amount of heat energy is very small. As all the stuff that is in the really small hot place spreads out, it will very quickly cool down (because there is very little heat energy), so it wont melt anything.

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