how much damage could a single atom heated at 100M degrees do?

If it was in your proximity for example

 

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Make 100 other atoms 1 million degrees each? And another 100,000 atoms a thousand degrees each?

Destroying a piece of flesh approximately the thickness of your gizzard?

 

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Virtually none. A single atom isn't very much of anything.

 

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Like James said, temperature of a single atom is rather meaningless, but if you took an atom from a collective of atoms who's average temperature was what you state, well, it wouldn't be an atom, it would be a nucleus, because at that temperature, all the electrons would have the energy to depart.

So it would touch something, and gain some electrons.

Also, like Roman said, one single atom isn't very much of anything, for instance, the gas inside a domestic fluorescent tube light is a plasma, at a few thousand degrees C, but it doesn't damage the very thin glass tube, because the gas is at such low pressure, there simply isn't enough gas to impart that much energy to the tube.

 

basically an atom that moves abound from its original point of location and time in a chaotic manner at a distance many million times bigger than billion times its approximate diameter.

 

• 
  
  Not really.
  
  You can use PV = 1/3nm<c^2>
  and PV = nRT
  
  to determine things about individual atoms, like the mean free path, but it's in the context of pressure, which means that atom is part of a gas exerting a pressure, and the temperature is the average energy for the gas, of course, statistically, the energies of the atoms will vary.
  
  So you can't really say anything accurate or meaningful about an individual atom, wrt temperatrure.

 

phlogistician PV=nRT is a generalization equation...using it in quantum world would be a sin.

 

The question is ill posed. The concept temperature does not apply to single atoms. One could ask about the kinetic energy a single atom carries (and even relate that kinetic energy to the average random energy of a collection of identical atoms that do have a temperature of 100M degrees.)

Also one must understand that a collection of atoms (of any significant density) at 100M degrees would be a plasma - ie. mix of ions and electrons, not atoms.

A mass of solar wind atoms do have significant kinetic energy, (much less than 100M degrees, I would guess), but not much temperature when they arrive at Earth. Many, if not most, are still ionized due to the extremely low density*, and exert pressure on the Earth's magnetic field, but surely some are neutral atoms. I doubt that the increasing magnetic field strength these neutral atoms experience is rapid enough to be felt as an ionizing E field. - Thus they probably collide with upper atmosphere atoms and indeed may be why there is an altitude range in the atmosphere in which the temperature increases with altitude after steadly dropping thru most (>99%, I think.) of the lower atmosphere.
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*The Saha equation will let you calcalculate what fracion is neutral. Reason they are ionized is that the neutrals can be photo-ionized by the solar UV and once the electon is separated, the low density means it takes a very long time for the recombination to happen. (Most of hydrogen in space not too far from a star is ionized even if only 30 degrees K (above absolute zero). I.e. because of the extremly low density, space is a very, very cold but nearly fully ionized plasma!)

 

I assumed that it was supposed to mean an atom with the average kinetic energy that a collection of such atoms would exhibit at 100M degrees. In which case the answer to the question about how much damage it could do would be "none," unless it happens to break a chromosome and give you cancer or something.

 

LOL! That's lateral.

 

Again:

A single atom, confined or not, has Kinetic Energy but no definable temperature. Perhaps considering a speeding bullet will help you understand why:

In the bullet case, there are many atoms and they do have a temperature, which is rising due to air friction as the bullet travels. Perhaps the bullet's peak temperature (the average energy associated with the random motion of the set of atoms in it) is on the order of 100C (boiling water temp) but it also has non random energy associated with its speed of advance. This kinetic energy is not part of the bullet's temperature. If I were to consider it from the POV of a ref. frame moving with the bullet, it still has the temperature but now has zero non-random energy.

The single atom flying thru space has no, zip, zero, random energy. Ergo, it has no well defined temperature* but in all but its own reference frame, it does have some kinetic energy. If you (or wiki) want to claim that it has a temperature, then that temperature depends strongly upon which reference frame is your POV and in its own frame it is at absolute zero! Clearly nonsense. Clearly wiki is wrong if it states otherwise. (Wiki is very often wrong.)
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*Now, except in the case of a 100% ionized atom (i.e. only the nucleus), it is actually more complex than the above implies because the bound electrons can be in excited states. One conceptually could under certain condition, (very unlikely to ever occur with an isolated atom traveling thru space) define a temperature based on the time average of the distribution of these electrons among the possible states. If by some highly improbable chance, the time average that distribution of electrons is approximately that which a large collection of atoms at temperature T would have, then the concept of temperature could be extended to claim that highly improbable atom did have temperature T.

The reason why there is extremely low probability (I think exactly zero probability for all types of atoms) that even a time average of the population of the electronic states would correspond to the distribution of electronic state populations present in a collection of mutually colliding like atoms with temperature T has is that radiative decay from some excited states is permitted and from others it is prohibited.

I.e. The electrons of the isolated (no collisions) atom would be in their lowest possible states, regardless of how fast it is flying thru space. Even the radiative "forbidden" excited states do have finite lifetimes. I.e. their radiative decay probability is not exactly zero.

For example, the green color one often sees in the aura borealis is due to the radiative decay of an excited "forbidden" state of oxygen. Normally this state is only both populated and depopulated by collisions, but at the very low pressure that high up in the atmosphere, that state is occasionally populated by a collision and before it has another collision, which very likely would depopulate it, it does decay with the emission of that green line.

That green line is impossible to produce and observe in the laboratory. A volume of many hundreds of cubic meters of very high vacuum slightly contaminated with oxygen would be required to get even one green photon per hour. It could not be noticed as all detectors have much higher "dark current" outputs, (even if cooled to liquid helium temperatures.) For this reason, it was quite a mystery for at least 100 years as to what was the transition that caused the green line in the northern lights. I think a friend of mine, now dead, Bill Fastie, with special spectrograph he designed to fit inside the nose cone of the small scout rockets, finally got the data used to confirm that the source was one of oxygen’s forbidden lines. His spectrograph design is still widely used as it has only one mirror, twice used, (which cannot move or get out of adjustment with respect to itself, despite the violent shakings the spectrograph experiences as the rocket climbs thru the atmosphere).

In the case of many molecules, mutually colliding, in addition this "electron temperature" one can also define a “rotational” and “vibrational” temperatures. Normally all three are the same but in certain cases they can differ. For example, immediately after a shock wave has passed thru the gas or in a sustained electric discharge thru the gas, the electron temperature is usually higher that the other two.

 

thanks for explanations to a layman question, especially BillyT excellent post!!

 

It would negate all of the weak molecular forces in all the molecules that compose the earth and thus cause the earth to spontaneously explode!!! Weeee!

If only I could convince someone at History Channel that were true, I'd get my own special!