is there a maximum temperature heat can reach?

Question

erm...thats it really

lol jimmy john you may get best answer yet.

Answer 1

Its a very good question.

The theoretical answer is no...

Firstly we need to talk about what heat is. It is vibration of atoms in a solid, liquid or gas. The lowest temperature possible is where all the atoms in a solid are completely stationary. This is called absolute zero, which is –273.15 °C.

Lets take an imaginary block of really cold metal and heat it up. Now as we increase the temperature the atoms vibrate more and more. This overcomes some of the forces holding them together and the metal melts and then as is get very hot turns to gas. If we are able to contain it and heat it further it will turn to plasma. This is where the heat causes the atoms themselves to fall apart. If you can continue to heat further and find a way to contain the metal nuclear fusion will start generating energy and causing further heating. If you can keep this contained the temperature will continue to rise. This is very hard to do and currently only occurs in stars.

In stars the force of gravity counteracts the thermal pressure generated by the immense heat. To get hotter still you must get more matter and create a bigger star. The upper limit of this is bound by the laws of physics. When the star gets too big the thermal pressure blows it apart.

If you could find another way to contain really hot plasma you could theoretically get hotter than the core temperature of the biggest stars.

So basically the upper limit is set by whether or not you can contain the thing that you are heating. But there is no upper limit to the amount of thermal energy you can give to a substance.

Answer 2

The question itself is a bit inacurate. "Maximum heat" is determined by the matter which is being heated. Water for example can only take so much heat before it becomes a gas, in turn that gas can only take so much heat (although it's quite a bit) before it loses it's molecular cohesion and becomes individual unbonded molecules. The sun on the other hand has an exponetional higher tolerance for heat. Now, I'm sure some where in the universe there is a material that can withstand temperatures higher than we could fathom, but heat ultimately is a result of energy being added to molecules.

Answer 3

Probably the maximum would be whatever temperature would cause matter to vibrate back and forth at the speed of light. Since you'd need to input more and more energy to cause the speed of the vibrations to inch just a little closer to the speed of light due to relativity, I'd think there is not maximum temperature.

Perhaps another maximum would be simply the total amount of energy in the universe condensed into small volume.

Answer 4

Heat is just really a measure of how much energy is stored in any particular system, and how much energy can be stored depends on the materials that make up the system.

For example: paper will store heat up to only a certain point, when it can store no more and any additional heat (energy) added breaks apart the consituent atoms that make up the paper in a chemical reaction we call combustion.

Metals can store lots of heat energy -- they'll go through a phase change (from solid to liquid), and many will go through another phase change (from liquid to gas) all the while still having the ability to absorb more heat energy.

So far we haven't found any matter that will continue to exist with the addition of infinite amounts of energy -- at some point all the matter we know of breaks down at some level of energy addition. Look at the sun -- hydrogen is able to handle a great deal of energy, but at some point highly energized hydrogen atoms bumping into each other will fuse into helium, and give up much of the energy they acquired in so doing.

How high temperature can go depends on the materials whose temperature you're measuring -- that's it. :)

Answer 5

I tend to agree that there is no upper limit. One poster said the same theorum that limits objects with mass from vibrating faster than the speed of light caught my attention.

I would tend to agree with that because as the vibration approached the speed of light, it would take an infinite amount of energy to increase the vibration any futher. And since 4 out of 5 physicists agree that there's a finite amount of matter, and thus energy, in the Universe, the theorhetical maximum temperature would be the sum of converting all of the matter except a single sub-atomic particle into the universe into energy and then infusing that energy into that single particle.

Answer 6

Yes. It's called the Planck temperature. It's about 1.4 times 10 to the 32 power degrees Kelvin (140 thousand billion billion billion K). At that temperature, space-time melts into an 11 dimensional goo.

Answer 7

super nova? A supernova (pl. supernovae) is a stellar explosion which produces an extremely bright object made of plasma that declines to invisibility over weeks or months. A supernova briefly outshines its entire host galaxy. It would take 10 billion years for the Sun to produce the energy output of an ordinary Type II supernova.

Answer 8

No, there is no maximum. Of course, it could never really be measured anyway due to lack of instrumentation capable of doing such measurement. And I agree with others that it depends on the materials that are heated up and measured.

Answer 9

although there r no theoretical limits but due to instrumental limitations and other practical problems we cannot go beyond a maximum which is of the order of 10^7

Answer 10

Theoretically there would be a certain value, which can be calculated if you take into account all the energy in the universe and concentrate it into one hot spot. The number would be ridiculously high.