The Coldest and Hottest Temperatures in the Known Universe (Infographic)

Earth may seem like it has a lot of diversity, and I suppose that it does. There are organisms that are smaller than the tip of a needle, and there a few that are the size of a building (like the blue whale), or a person (like the Nomura’s jellyfish) . But in truth, many things on our planet are really rather tame. At least, they are tame as far as our experiences go. Take temperature. This may vary by fifty degrees from winter to summer, give or take a little, but this really isn’t much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

For example, the hottest temperature, known as “Planck Temperature,” hits more than 100 million million million million million degrees, or 1032 K. As it has been noted, “You just can’t put this kind of temperature into perspective. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around this number. Saying that 1032 K is hot is like saying that the universe occupies some space” — We can’t go any higher than this, because if we try to, physics breaks. Literally. Gravity grows as strong as the other fundamental forces and, in essence, they all become one force.

That is what we are looking for: the math behind that one force. That is the theory of everything. A kind of quantum gravity. Unfortunately, for now, it is beyond us, and so the highest temperature remains the ceiling, as it were. But now I am getting a bit off topic.

The point, however, is that the hottest hot and the coldest cold will blow your mind, and you should check out this infographic to get a better idea of what hot and cold really mean. Scroll below for a link to a larger version:

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog