I never did come to quite understand the concept of temperamenture in a vacuum.
Alot of this conversation is beyond me, but I do have the following real world example to illustrate the gist of the phenomena mentioned by you earlier.
TEMPERATURE IN A VACUUM:
There is a thermos bottle that is sold, it is metal, and the walls of it are hollow, and the air space inbetween the walls are evacuated and sealed upon manufacture to be a vacuum.
A friend of mine bought one of these thermos bottles, and made some tea to take with him and his wife on a day trek up and down a mountain while on on holiday.
They made the tea at 5 AM that morning. They consumed it at 6 PM that evening, and he reported that the tea was damn near close to the temperature that it was upon being poured into the thermos bottle.
Apparently, the complete absence of particles (ala the vacuum) that can bounce to and fro between the outer and inner walls of the thermos bottle creates a situation where the tea inside the thermos has very little opportunity to transfer its heat to anything in the outside world.
I thought this interesting when I heard it.
When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that space was basically absolute zero, or infinitely cold, and that if we were up there with no space suit, in addition to suffocating, we would completely freeze.
My Dad told me the same thing, and when I saw the space suttle Challenger blow up I relinquished any and all aspirations I ever had of becoming an astronaut, and let loose of any curiousities I had about what it might be like up there. I'm the ultimate realist. If I'm not going to experience from it, or have a high probability of benefitting from knowledge of a given phenomena, I quickly lose interest in it.
Don't get me wrong, I respect astronauts immensely, and I am really glad I had a chance to eat NASA ice cream as a kid, and read of how tomoato plants grew in zero gravity up on the international space station, but in the big picture of things, that's as far as my interest goes, and I'm real comfy down here in my thermal underwear.
Later on, I learned that hot and cold were not equal poles; cold was the absence of heat, and only matter gets hot. The temperature we feel on earth is largely the air. Direct sunlight would figure as well. So on the moon and other planets with no atmosphere, when they give a "surface temperature" (+200 on the sunlit side and -200 on the dark side), I take it it means the actual surface (ground), and not any kind of ambient temperature above it.
And space does absorb heat, so IIRC, the Apollo mission, when the heat failed the air was starting to get really cold.
So I guess absolute zero is not the temperature of a particular region of space. It would only be matter, with all of the heat removed, and heat is the motion of molecules. (And again, any matter near a black hole will be superheated from all the friction of surrounding matter). Scientists often speak of absolute zero, but they probably are referring to
close to absolute zero.[/QUOTE]