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NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System

(www.iflscience.com)
246 points world2vec | 1 comments | 23 Jun 25 16:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.515s | source
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LeratoAustini ◴[23 Jun 25 17:51 UTC] No.44358284[source]▶
I often think about how cold our lifeforms on earth are, relative to temperatures of things in the universe. 0 Kelvin is theoretical lowest possible temp, quasars are apparently > 10 trillion Kelvin (10,000,000,000,000K), yet all life we know of is between what, 250K and 400K?
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hanche ◴[23 Jun 25 20:47 UTC] No.44359908[source]▶
If you’ll excuse a bit of trivia: SI units named after people are not capitalized. So we have newton, joule, weber, kelvin, named after Newton, Joule, Weber, and Kelvin. (But their abbreviations are capitalized: N, J, Wb, K.)
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nayuki ◴[24 Jun 25 00:57 UTC] No.44361837[source]▶
Correct. The parent of your post should have written "10 trillion kelvins", "10 terakelvins", or "10 TK". The article wrote "Temperatures there reach an astonishing 30,000-50,000 kelvin" instead of "kelvins" (or better yet, 30–50 kK).

Very few people use the unit kelvin correctly. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Metric/comments/126sniq/everyone_mi... )

The only exception regarding capitalization is that the person Celsius is capitalized in the multi-word unit "degree(s) Celsius", and the pluralization is on "degree".

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1. hanche ◴[24 Jun 25 15:53 UTC] No.44367554[source]▶
Good point about pluralization. I tend to be confused about that because we don't pluralize units in Norwegian (except the equivalent of degrees). But confusingly, in English, you sometimes see people trying to pluralize the abbreviations, such as kgs for kilograms. Or (even worse) ms for meters. That way madness lies.