What’s hotter than the hottest stars in the Universe? – Big Think
Stars are what illuminate the depths of space.Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; Processing: J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. AnselmiNearly all luminous radiation is starlight: emitted from plasma-rich stellar photospheres.Stars’ typical surface temperatures are no lower than ~2700 K.The most massive main-sequence stars cap out with exterior temperatures of ~50,000 K.When red giants eject their outer layers, their central cores contract into white dwarfs, reaching surface temperatures of ~150,000 K.Highly evolved Wolf-Rayet stars have the hottest photospheres.Surrounded by ejecta and fusing heavy elements internally, they can achieve temperatures of ~210,000 K.But there are places in the Universe where even greater temperatures are attained.Young neutron star surfaces, like the Crab pulsar, radiate at ~600,000 K.X-ray emitting gas clouds can surpass those temperatures: reaching up to perhaps 100,000,000 K.The interiors of stars and stellar remnants are often hotter still.The hottest stellar cores can exceed 300,000,000 K, causing electron-positron pair production and photodisintegration effects.Neutron star interiors reach ~1012 (one trillion) K: sufficiently hot to create quark-gluon plasmas.But supermassive black holes create the highest-energy phenomena of all.Accelerated particles maximally achieve ~1020 eV energies, implying ~1024 K temperatures.Only in the Big Bang itself were hotter conditions ever created.Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words.
Source: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/hotter-hottest-stars/
