Is the sun the hottest thing in the universe?

Moment of Um

American Public Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do curling irons, campfires, and cups of hot cocoa have in common? They’re all hot! But nothing is as hot as the sun – at least not in our solar system! But what about the rest of the universe? Is the sun the hottest thing? We asked astronomer Mark Popinchalk to help us find the answer.

Got a question that’s too hot to handle? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll find an explanation that shines!

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.
0:03.7	Um, um, um, um,
0:09.3	moment of um comes to you from APM Studios, and this show is so hot right now.
0:16.2	I should know because I'm the sun.
0:18.8	Um...
0:21.8	Seriously, I'm not even trying to brag. I'm really not. It's just a fact. You can't even look at me without
0:29.6	toasting your eyeballs. Are you intimidated by my beauty? Is it blinding? I didn't do
0:38.1	anything to get this hot. I've been a perfect sphere of gas and molten plasma for literally billions of years.
0:46.7	I mean, it's not my fault that I'm the hottest thing in the literal universe.
0:51.9	What do you mean you're not sure about that?
0:55.0	Ravi, what do you think?
0:57.0	My name is Ravi. I live in Washington, D.C.
1:01.0	My question is, is the sun the hottest thing in the universe? My name also means the sun in Sanskrit.
1:08.0	The sun is the hottest thing in our solar system, but it's not the hottest thing in the universe.
1:17.0	My name is Mark Popinchuk. I'm a graduate student at the Coney Graduate Center and at the American Museum of Natural History.
1:23.0	It turns out the sun is kind of like a middle-sized star and bigger stars are going to run even hotter than the sun.
1:32.0	And that's not the hottest thing in the universe yet, because besides
1:36.8	stars there are other things that get even hotter. If you think of a black hole, you think there's no light coming from it, it's this black thing.
1:46.0	But around a black hole, there might be stuff that's falling onto it,
1:51.0	this kind of what we call an accretion disk around a black hole.
1:57.4	And that can get even hotter still, to almost 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
2:04.0	So these are really, really hot things.
	...

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