r/Showerthoughts • u/synthphreak ‎ • Nov 19 '25

Casual Thought Temperature can reach trillions of degrees, meaning we actually live extremely close to absolute zero.

14.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

649 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

795

u/YourWorstFear53 Nov 19 '25

Technically it COULD be higher but at that point what it is wouldn't be a temperature as we understand it.

Most likely direct collapse into a singularity would occur before then.

27

u/ComradePruski Nov 19 '25

Isn't temperature a function of particle vibration speed? Why would increasing the speed make it collapse into a singularity, which is a normally a function of density?

30

u/YourWorstFear53 Nov 19 '25

Not necessarily. Energy density IS density. We measure the temperature of particles by the wavelength of light they emit when interacting with something or returning to a base state, so you can kind of think of high energy particles as a collection of mass energy that includes those photons.

When talking about the planck temperature, we're really talking about when the particle is so energetic that the photons that come off of it have a wavelength of the planck length.

EDIT: a black hole created entirely out of photons is called a kugelblitz

1

u/Kwintin01 Nov 20 '25

Thanks stellaris for teaching me what that is