science [hottest temperature]

Does black heat exist?

Depends on what you mean. AFAIK it’s quite possible for an object to radiate heat but no visible light.

Follow up:
this text (2nd diagram) indicates that black bodies at 300K (about room temperature) radiate no visible light

Don’t almost all objects radiate heat without visible light? If you close up a room and turn all the lights off, there’s no light but there’s plenty of IR being radiated.

First off what the hell is “black heat”? Heat, is simply a transfer of energy across system boundaries. If, what you’re asking is "Can heat be invisible to the naked eye?’ then yeah - I mean ever seen a ice cube melt in a blinding flash of light while cooling your drink?

Yes. You can buy it on Amazon.

I mean what is the hottest heat there is

You mean beyond red, white, blue heat, etc?

The master speaks.

yes beyond red,blue,etc

That’s not heat - that’s temperature. You feel the transfer of energy from an object to your body (say from red iron to your hand), but it’s the temperature of the object that’s linked to colour. Stupid too when you consider that red hot iron is not at the same temperature as red hot titanium.

Basically the more energy your pour into a single contained system the hotter it gets, with limits set by the available energy of the universe, the ability of the system to contain itself and general quantum weirdness.

Wait, really? I thought that absent any major absorption or emission, all black body radiation will give the same color at a given temperature.

but can it get too hot to see

I don’t think so. As the temperature gets extremely high, the peak emission will be at a higher frequency than visible light, but there will still be plenty of visible emissions as well.

I think it’s possible for an object to get so hot that it emits only X rays, but if you’re looking at it as it warms up to this temperature, things might go black for an entirely different reason.

Nope I was wrong - Wein’s displacement law

Well if you want to wiggle yourself out of trouble, technically the iron and titanium are not black bodies, so they will have a different color. I don’t know how different, but I’m certain that there are some absorption bands that will slightly deviate from Wein’s displacement law.

Edited title to indicate subject.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Nah, I’ll take the hit. :slight_smile: Was a stupid thing to fling out there without considering what I was saying.

No. When you heat up an object, the amount of visible light increases (as does the amount of IR, the amount of UV, or any other wavelength band). You can certainly get to a temperature where the amount of X-rays increases more than the visible light does, so in relative terms, the total emission becomes more X-ray dominated, but in absolute terms, there’s still more visible light there than there was before.