If you’ve ever been somewhere like Death Valley, California or perhaps India, you know what hot is. The fry an egg on the sidewalk kind of hot that makes you wonder why we don’t all live in the tropics where it’s reasonable. Sure, we can experience extreme temperatures on Earth. The hottest temperature recorded was 134 degrees F. That’s nothing compared to some planets in our solar system, though.
1. In our solar system, look to our twin.
You might think that the planet closest to the Sun would be the hottest, but in fact Mercury’s temperature is variable. The side that faces the Sun is a roasting. 869 degrees F, but the side facing away from the Sun is -299.2 degrees. Average those out, and Mercury definitely isn’t the hottest. That title belongs to Venus, which is regularly sitting at about 860 degrees thanks to its runaway greenhouse effect.
2. The hottest planet we know of isn’t local.
Outside our solar system, things can get even hotter. The hottest planet that we know of has a surface temperature of 7820 degrees. That’s only a couple thousand degrees cooler than the surface of the Sun!
3. What’s the hottest possible?
These temperatures sound unimaginable, and they are ridiculously hot for the surface of planets. It’s entirely possible that there is a hotter planet out there yet to be discovered, so we’ll have to keep looking. As far as the hottest temperatures of other celestial objects go, some stars can reach 200 million at their core. What tops everything, though, is a temperature we’ve recorded here on Earth at the Large Hadron Collider. When two gold particles were smashed together, they produced temperatures exceeding 7 trillion degrees.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram