Science Fact of the Day September 16, 2009
Posted by spatialrift47 in SFoTD.trackback
According to the predicted Unruh effect, acceleration through space produces a non-zero temperature reading. If you were to accelerate your car at Earth’s gravitational acceleration, 9.81 m/s2, you would produce a temperature increase of 4×10-20 K, which could have some serious cumulative effects on your engine over the course of a few billion years.
O_o what’s raising the temperature?
The acceleration of the object puts energy into spacetime. Some of it comes back out as a thermal bath of particles. The particles then collide with the object and raise its temperature. It’s similar to how the extreme gravitational field of a black hole produces Hawking radiation.