The absolute zero marks the minimum temperature at which something can be found and corresponds to -273.15º Celsius, or 0 Kelvin. Since heat is nothing other than movement, this temperature marks the total stillness, but what happens at the opposite end?
Planck temperature. Although we are less familiar with the other extreme, Planck’s temperature, or the “absolute heat”, Another concept managed by contemporary physics. Here we might make emphasis on” contemporary physics “since, at this temperature, what we know of physics stops operating, which leaves us in an unknown terrain.
How much heat are we talking about? Well around 142 quintillones Kelvin (K). Or what is the same, 1.42 · 10^32 degrees Celsius: the 273 degrees of difference between both scales are inconsequential on this scale.
As a comparison, we can point out that the estimated temperature of the core of our sun is about 15 million Kelvinalthough the remnant nuclei of some supernovas can reach the billion degrees. Here on Earth, science has achieved even higher temperatures: More than 5 billion Kelvin in an experiment conducted in 2012 in the Great Hadron Colliding (LHC) of CERN.
Defining the maximum. We indicated before the absolute zero in temperature was marked by the lack of movement, the absence of thermal energy. The temperature is an energy transfer measure, if something has no energy, It cannot transmit it. However, to find absolute heat we must go beyond thermodynamics and incorporate another area, that of quantum physics.
To understand this limit, we must know that heat is associated with emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum. At more heat, more energy, shorter will be the frequency in this spectrum. Well, this spectrum is not infinite since the known universe has its own minimum distance, Planck’s distance.
This minimum length Mark too The shortest wavelength and the maximum energy that we can introduce into a photon. It is therefore impossible to transfer more thermal energy.
A rather theoretical idea. Planck’s temperature remains, as we pointed out before, far from both what we can see in the universe and what we are able to recreate in a laboratory. There was a time when it may not be so, since in the first moments after the Big BangThe universe would have reached this type of temperatures.
But precisely the Big Bang It is one of those contexts in which the laws of physics as we understand them are not applicable.
Beyond contemporary physics. The Big Bang is a clear example that there is physics that still escapes us, as are black holes. In both cases these are contexts so extreme that the description of what happens in them through the laws of physics we handle makes it impossible.
However, we continue in the search for knowledge about these extremes and the laws that could operate on them. Probably, the long -awaited “theory” of all that unifies what we know about relativistic gravity with quantum physics can give us important clues about this border of heat and, above all, what may be beyond this.
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