Shouldn’t the vacuum insulate the glass from the heat of the burning filament?

    • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      26
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Because of me. Whenever I look up at the sun, I think about the inevitable supernova which the sun sooner or later will turn into. This in turn gives me anxiety and makes me sweat a lot, which heats the earth.

      • notUboiii@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the sun too small to turn into a supernova? and basically will just die a boring death after swallowing all the planets in the solar system and fade into nothingness

        • Burninator05@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          A new worry has been unlocked: We’re all going to die but not in a cool way and all the other solar systems will think we’re lame.

            • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Don’t worry, it has zero effect on global warming. These are timescales so vast, humanity will have either wiped itself out or evolved into something unrecognisable long before the sun starts expanding.

              Global warming is something that operates on the order of decades or centuries.

              If we manage to stop global warming and maintain or better yet repair the state of our climate afterwards, it will take roughly a billion years for the sun to get 10% hotter and boil off our oceans regardless of what we do and longer yet for it to start its red giant phase.

              To put that in perspective, a billion years ago life on Earth was all single celled.

              • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Not sure if you’re serious, or expanding further on the running joke.

                Thank you for the explanation, but outside of the joke I am fully aware of the time scales and origin and consequences of global warming. :)

            • efrique@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              global warming is definitely something it makes sense to worry about and which there’s still some chance to mitigate the worst effects of.

              The sun expanding - or even the much earlier effects before that happens, as the sun gets hotter - will happen on such long time scales that there simply won’t be any humans at all; most species only last about a million years or so, vastly less time than we’re talking about.

              We might well make the planet nigh uninhabitable in considerably less than one-millionth of the sun-being-a-major-problem time. It’s like worrying about the bridge maybe rusting dangerously a few decades from now, while not paying attention to the truck that has just veered onto your side of the road and will surely hit you in the next few seconds. You need to take evasive maneuvers, not worry about the bridge.

          • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            The vast majority of solar systems have significantly smaller suns with equally lame or lamer endings.

            That said, because the sun is slowly getting hotter over the ages the older it gets, the Earth’s oceans will have boiled off before the sun starts expanding.

        • efrique@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          basically will just die a boring death after swallowing all the planets in the solar system

          Not all the planets, no. Mercury and Venus, sure. The earth’s orbit will move somewhat further out when the sun expands, and probably won’t be swallowed but it will at least be well baked.

        • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Not quite that large. At the peak of its red giant phase, the sun’s size will reach just about Earth’s current orbit. Quite possibly the Earth will remain just slightly outside the sun due to the orbit becoming larger to compensate for the sun’s decreasing mass, but the Earth’s oceans will have boiled off before the sun even enters its red giant phase, because between now and then the sun will get progressively hotter over the millenia (well, technically this slow increase in average sun temperature has been going on for ages already, it’s just really slow and masked by several cycles).

  • FiskFisk33@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Vacuum means no convection heat. It however does not mean no radiation heat. The filament radiates heat through vacuum the same way the sun does.

    Additionally, theres not vacuum in buldbs, but inert gas, like argon.

  • testfactor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    57
    ·
    1 year ago

    In addition to the stuff everyone else is saying, most modern bulbs don’t have a vacuum at all.

    Most modern bulbs are filled with an inert gas like argon or xenon. Usually at a lower pressure (around 70% of standard atmospheric pressure), but nowhere near a vacuum.

    This has, while inert to chemical reaction, is more than capable of transferring heat.

  • Apepi@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Heat is infrared. Light. Vacuum doesn’t have much effect.

    Also many bulbs are filled with inert gases rather than being vacuums.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      58
      ·
      1 year ago

      Heat is infrared. Light.

      All light heats up anything that absorbs it. This includes infrared, but it also includes visible light, microwaves, radio waves, etc. You can get a nasty burn from putting your hand near a live radio transmitter antenna, for example, even though it’s emitting in RF, not infrared.

      In addition, all physical objects glow with a light that is determined by their temperature. This includes your body. You are, right now, emitting light. As it happens, because of your body’s temperature, that light is mostly in the infrared.

      Why do kids’ science books leave you with the impression that “heat is infrared”? Because you can see body heat with an infrared camera. Infrared is light that you can’t see with your eyes — but with the right tool, you can use to see body heat. This rounds off to “heat is infrared”.

      Heat is not infrared. All physical objects emit light; objects around human body temperature glow mostly in the infrared; which we can’t see with our eyes, but can see with scientific instruments. And when an object absorbs light (including infrared), it gets hotter.

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m no lightbulb expert but I can tell you a vacuum still allows heat transfer via radiation. This is how we get warm from the sun.

    I also doubt the inside of a filament lightbulb is a near perfect vacuum, but maybe a bulb expert will come along to shed some light on that.

    • projectazar@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Heat radiation in a vacuum is also an important aspect of space travel. If heat could not radiate in a vacuum, we would not be able to dump excess heat from space craft and, at some point, the combination of electric devices operating within the pressure vessel and human heat output would eventually roast the people inside. We need heat to radiate outwards, and, from my understanding, it’s actually a somewhat difficult problem to solve in a vacuum. We take air and evaporative cooling for granted sometimes when on Earth and in space, where air cooling isn’t going to happen, you have to practice other methods of heat transfer.

  • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    1 year ago

    3 forms of heat transfer

    Conduction. Transfer of heat from one medium to another.

    Convection. Transfer of heat within the same medium.

    Radiation. Non-contact transfer of heat.

  • Archpawn@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 year ago

    In addition to what others have said, they’re not a vacuum inside. They’re filled with 0.7 atm of argon gas. That would slow the transfer of heat, but there’d still be plenty of heat transfer through convection.

      • curiosityLynx@kglitch.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        1 year ago

        Several reasons. But I would guess a big part is that air pressure drops with altitude. 1atm is the pressure at sea level. According to my google-fu the air pressure on Mt Everest is a mere 0.33 atm.

        You don’t want your light bulb exploding when it breaks, especially if part of the reason you put a special gas in it was to prevent it from imploding when it breaks.

        Now of course most people live significantly closer to sea level than to the peak of Mt Everest, but if a gas is heated in an enclosed space, its pressure rises.

        Also, if you have to choose between shards tending to go inwards or outwards when the bulb shatters, you’d probably prefer them tending to go inwards, provided it’s not so fast they shoot past the middle as they would with a much lower pressure.

        Lastly, it saves on gas.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    The filament is heated by electrical resistance. That heat energy comes out as photons in a wide band in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum. Some of those photons are intercepted by the glass bulb, the metal housing, etc.; their energy heats these materials up.

    Even though a vacuum prevents conduction of heat energy, it doesn’t prevent radiation of that energy in the form of photons. That’s how the light gets from the filament to the room; and that’s how the heat gets to the surface of the bulb too.

  • Sunspear@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    Maybe they are thinking of how mugs and thermoses can be labeled “vacuum sealed,” and that the marketing implies that the vacuum between the walls insulates the outer wall (where the hand touches) against the heat.

    • WigglyTortoise@dmv.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      One of my favorite things about Reddit was that any link in a thread about light bulbs, heaters, EVs, or other appliances was almost certainly to a Technology Connections video. I’m glad to see that trend continuing on Lemmy.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    There’s no perfect vacuum. But as others have mentioned already, most of it is electromagnetic radiation. A very small part of this radiation is the visible light you see, most of it is invisible to the human eye.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Heat radiates as infrared light. Infrared doesn’t pass through glass well, so the glass absorbs the heat radiated from the filament.

    Heat passed through molecular collisions is conduction, and that is the part blocked by a vacuum.

    So the filament is emitting visible and infrared and the bulb is designed to let the visible pass through.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Vacuum is an absence of stuff. What would be insulating the glass? Air would be an insulator; a vacuum wouldn’t do shit.

    Think of heat like a physical object. It can travel through a vacuum unimpeded. There is nothing within a vacuum to stop the heat traveling through it. But if there was even just a thin atmosphere, it would collide with some of those molecules and not reach the glass, taking longer for the glass to get hot.

    It’s a bit more complicated than that since in reality the air will also be heated and transfer that heat, but just for the purpose of how vacuums work, we can ignore all that.