Can heat waves travel through a vacuum?

Question

3 cylinders one inside another inside another witth the middle cylinder area being a vacuum will heat waves travel through that vacuum or do they need molecules for heat tranfer?

Answer 1

"heat" can't travel through a vacuum, but light can. heat transfer occurs by three mechanisms: conduction, convection and radiation (light, in other words). in a vacuum only the last of the three is possible - it tends to be slower than the other two, but not zero. after all the sun heats the earth despite the vacuum in between the two bodies...

Answer 2

Walk outside on a sunny day and hold your hand up to the sun.  The sun's infrared radiation traveled through 150 milllion km (93 million miles) worth of vacuum to get to your hand and warm it up  Heat is transfered by infrared radiation, which is basically light with wavelengths longer then red so our eyes can't see it.  The radiation causes atoms/molecules to vibrate which we think of as heat.  One can debate the finer points on if heat means only molecular vibration or includes infrared radiation, but in the end it's just semantics.

Answer 3

Heat and / or temperature is simply the random motion of atoms, or better put, vibration of atoms.  The more they vibrate, the hotter they are.  Being in a complete vacuum you are not going to have heat waves.  Radiation on the other hand could heat up the vacuums one by one.  If you had, say, a light bulb in the center vacuum tube which is all metal and no glass.  The radiation from the bulb would travel through the vacuum and strike the metal housing of the vacuum tube.  The radiation from the light would raise the random motion of the molecules in the metal cylinder and as a consequence would emit infrared radiation.  This infrared radiation would emit from the tube and travel to the next vacuum tube and heat it up as well. And thus the process repeats itself to the final tube and so on and so forth.  But if there was not anything to radiate energy from inside the first tube then there would be no heat or energy to lose.

Answer 4

Temperature is the measurement of the speed of the particles in a given substance. The faster the particles, the hotter the substance. A vacuum has no molecules, so the temperature would be absolute 0 (-273˚C; 0˚K) so there would be no heat. Energy can travel through a vacuum, but a substance could not be heated because there are no molecules.

Answer 5

"Heat waves" doesn't really describe a physical concept.  But an object can transfer heat across a vacuum to another object by means of electromagnetic radiation.  The emissive and absorptive properties vary from substance to substance, and the overall transfer depends on many variables.

And while radiation is the predominant method of heat transfer in the universe, from the engineering point of view convection and conduction are more efficient (or effective, depending on your perspective) forms.  Convection is roughly an order of magnitude more effective than radiation, and conduction is roughly an order of magnitude more effective than convection.  But that's just one practical perspective; physics takes a more causational approach to understand the underlying mechanisms.

Answer 6

Looking at the universe as a whole, radiation is THE mode of heat transfer. Conduction and convection are miniscule means of heat transfer.

Answer 7

heat is molecules. your feeling the molecules, not the heat energy itself. eventually energy will transfer through a vacuum, but very slowly. normally heat is transferred via convection, which requires molecules bumping into eachother. eventually the heat will transfer through the vacuum via radiation, but that would take a while.

Answer 8

There are no such things as 'heat waves'.

If you put a hot object next to a cold object with a vacuum separating them, the cold object WILL tend to heat up. This is because part of the hot object's heat energy is turned into electromagnetic radiation (light, although not always visible light), which can traverse a vacuum and heat up the cold object when they hit it. However, there is no way for the heat to be transferred directly, it must rely on the electromagnetic force in order to do so. We can observe this phenomenon on sunny days; when you put your hand in the sunlight, it's warmer than when you put it in the shade.