Everyone likes to joke about this manhole cover flying around in space, but if you do the math on the aerodynamic heating you get a temperature higher than the boiling point of iron.
Iron goes molten at 2,800f. The air friction would have caused that long before getting to space. As for staying together and resolidifying in space…well imagine how well maple syrup would stay held together if you threw it out of a cup pretty hard. The iron would have went molten and just proceeded to “spatter” and not have any piece left heavy enough to keep up an escape velocity.
space might not cool it down because the only real way for it to lose the heat would be blackbody radiation. by now it’s probably cooled off but without any atmosphere or other materials to cool it off, it probably stayed hot for a while
But also at that speed it’d only be in the atmosphere for a couple seconds; even at that high temp it may not have been able to transfer all that energy into the manhole cover. The energy may have just gone into ablating away the surface.
But it probably ablated away the whole mass of the manhole cover.
Everyone likes to joke about this manhole cover flying around in space, but if you do the math on the aerodynamic heating you get a temperature higher than the boiling point of iron.
What is irons vaporization temp? And wouldn’t space cool it down(and keep it somewhat together barring other gravitational objects affecting it.
Iron goes molten at 2,800f. The air friction would have caused that long before getting to space. As for staying together and resolidifying in space…well imagine how well maple syrup would stay held together if you threw it out of a cup pretty hard. The iron would have went molten and just proceeded to “spatter” and not have any piece left heavy enough to keep up an escape velocity.
space might not cool it down because the only real way for it to lose the heat would be blackbody radiation. by now it’s probably cooled off but without any atmosphere or other materials to cool it off, it probably stayed hot for a while
But also at that speed it’d only be in the atmosphere for a couple seconds; even at that high temp it may not have been able to transfer all that energy into the manhole cover. The energy may have just gone into ablating away the surface.
But it probably ablated away the whole mass of the manhole cover.