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Comment by apothegm

4 days ago

Vacuum? It’s a terrible conductor. Closer to a perfect insulator.

It's a perfect conductor of infrared radiation which is how we cool space stations without ambient air to remove the heat via convection.

  • Indeed. But radiative cooling in vacuum is much slower than conductive cooling per unit surface area (even just in air at sea level on earth, air being a fairly poor conductor) unless you manage to concentrate the heat in your radiator at a massive temperature that most materials can’t withstand.

    And conductive heat transfer is what’s being measured in the context of this article.