this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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ELI5
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Explain it to me like I am 5. Everybody should know what this is about.
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There are some gasses that will basically never freeze. Hydrogen freezes at -259.5°C for example and you'll basically never find anywhere that cold in the known universe except for here on Earth. Even as you go up the period table, individual elements still freeze at a very, very low temperate. Oxygen comes in at −218.79°C. Molecules obviously behave differently, but the general freezing point of what we call "air" which is mostly Nitrogen with a little bit of Oxygen freezes somewhere below -210°C.
So it's pretty unlikely that an entire atmosphere would freeze and fall down as precipitation. There are very, very few places in the known universe that could have an atmosphere and yet get that cold.
Side question. I always thought that it was colder in deep space than anywhere near a star. What about earth causes things to naturally (not talking artificial stuff like freezers) get cooler than places in space that have no heat source?
Naturally occurring? Yeah space wins. But artificially? The hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded were here on Earth in a lab. Here's a cool infographic about it. The TLDR of which is the coldest temperature was -273 °C and the hottest (currently -- the early universe was hotter) was 5.5 trillion °C both on Earth.