5/23/2018 Viktor T. Toth's answer to If outer space is a vacuum how do they measure the temperature?

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If outer space is a vacuum how do they

measure the temperature?
Viktor T. Toth, IT pro, part-time physicist
Answered Nov 5, 2015 · Author has 5.5k answers and 33.2m answer views

Space itself has no temperature. But it is a legitimate question to ask what happens to
a thermometer in space.

As you learn in science class, an object may exchange heat with its environment three
different ways: conduction, convection and radiation. In space the first two are out:
there is nothing to conduct heat or to convect heat. What remains is radiation.

So if the thermometer, say, was originally at room temperature, it will start to radiate
that heat out into empty space. But will it receive any heat in the form of radiation? Of
course.

If that thermometer is in the vicinity of the Earth, it will receive plenty of sunlight. It
will also get a fair amount of heat from the Earth itself. So don't be surprised if you see
the temperature of the thermometer soar.

But what if you take that thermometer into really, really, really deep space? Say, one of
those incredible voids in between clusters of galaxies that are so far from everything,
if you found yourself there, you'd see nothing but pitch black space, as even the
nearest galaxy is too far away, too faint for the human eye to see? Well... the
thermometer will start to cool, radiating away its residual heat. It will cool all the way
down to about 2.7 kelvin (that is, roughly -270°C or -455°F). Why no further? Because
at that low temperature, it will radiate the same amount of heat that it receives from
the deep sky in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation. In short, the
thermometer will be in thermal equilibrium with the sky.

So if we really were hard pressed to assign (deep) space a temperature, this would be
it: 2.7 K, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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About the Author

Viktor T. Toth
IT pro, part-time physicist

Information technology professional

1979-present
Studied at Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Lives in Ottawa, ON

33.2m answer views

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