Freezing at high temperatures with very low pressure?

Question

The temperature very high in the Earth's atmosphere can be 700 degrees Celsius. Yet an animal there would freeze to death rather than roast. Explain.


Help please!

Answer 1

Radiative heat loss. In vacuum in outer space you would freeze because your body would radiate away all of its heat. In high atmosphere a similar effect takes place, because even though there may be very hot gas particles, there are very few of them (very low pressure). They would warm you slightly but you would lose heat through radiation faster.

Of course you would probably suffocate before freezing to death.

Answer 2

I'm asuming that you mean the edge of the earths atmosphere and it doesnt get that hot there. There is low pressure there however and so things can boil at lower temperatures. They also need lower temperatures to freeze. The suns radiation only turns to heat when it hits something, and at the edge of the atmosphere there is nothing to hit.

Answer 3

Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in a medium. What we "feel" as hot or cold is a huge number of molecules of air hitting our body. The faster they travel, the hotter we feel (more kinetic energy = higher temperature). In a very low pressure scenario, there is a substantially lower amount of particles hitting us (or in this case, the animal), so even though they have a high kinetic energy level, there's not a lot of them to transfer their kinetic energy to the animal's body and heat it up.

Answer 4

I never heard of that one before. But if the temperature of the air is very high it is also very sparse. I imagine that the heat of the animal would radiate away into space and there is not enough hot air to replace the heat.