angel eyes1212: .3 Pumping and ambient air pressure 8 Effects on humans and animals 9 Examples 10 See also 11 References 12 External links Etymology The word vacuum comes from Latin, meaning 'an empty space, void', noun use of neuter of vacuus, meaning "empty", related to vacare, meaning "be empty".
Vacuum is one of the few words in the English language that contains two consecutive letters 'u'.[7]
Historical interpretation Historically, there has been much dispute over whether such a thing as a vacuum can exist. Ancient Greek philosophers debated the existence of a vacuum, or void, in the context of atomism, which posited void and atom as the fundamental explanatory elements of physics. Following Plato, even the abstract concept of a featureless void faced considerable skepticism: it could not be apprehended by the senses, it could not, itself, provide additional explanatory power beyond the physical volume with which it was commensurate and, by definition, it was quite literally nothing at all, which cannot rightly be said to exist. Aristotle believed that no void could occur naturally, because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill any incipient rarity that might give rise to a void.
In his Physics, book IV, Aristotle offered numerous arguments against the void: for example, that motion through a medium which offered no impediment could continue ad infinitum, there being no reason that something would come to rest anywhere in particular. Although Lucretius argued for the existence of vacuum in the first century BC and Hero of Alexandria tried unsuccessfully to create an artificial vacuum in the first century AD,[8] it was European scholars such as Roger Bacon, Blasius of Parma and Walter Burley in the 13th and 14th century who focused considerable attention on these issues. Eventually following Stoic physics in this instance, scholars from the 14th century onward increasingly departed from the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a supernatural void beyond the confines of the cosmos itself, a conclusion widely acknowledged by the 17th century, which helped to segregate natural and theological concerns.[9]
Almost two thousand years after Plato, René Descartes also proposed a geometrically based alternative theory of atomism, without the problematic nothing–everything dichotomy of void and atom. Although Descartes agreed with the contemporary position, that a vacuum does not occur in nature, the success of his namesake coordinate system and more implicitly, the spatial–corporeal component of his metaphysics would come to define the philosophically modern notion of empty space as a quantified extension of volume. By the ancient definition however, directional information and magnitude were conceptually distinct.
Torricelli's mercury barometer produced one of the first sustained vacuums in a laboratory. In the medieval Middle Eastern world, the physicist and Islamic scholar, Al-Farabi (Alpharabius, 872–950), conducted a small experiment concerning the existence of vacuum, in which he investigated handheld plungers in water.[10][unreliable source?] He concluded that air's volume can expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept of perfect vacuum was incoherent.[11] However, according to Nader El-Bizri, the physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965–1039) and the Mu'tazili theologians disagreed with Aristotle and Al-Farabi, and they supported the existence of a void. Using geometry, Ibn al-Haytham mathematically demonstrated that place (al-makan) is the imagined three-dimensional void between the inner surfaces of a containing body.[12] According to Ahmad Dallal, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī also states that "there is no observable evidence that rules out the possibility of vacuum".[13] The suction pump later appeared in Europe from the 15th century.[14][15][16]
Medieval thought experiments into the idea of a vacuum considered whether a vacuum was present, if only for an instant, between two flat plates when they were rapidly separated.[17] There was much discussion of whether the air moved in quickly enough as the plates were separated, or, as Walter Burley postulated, whether a 'celestial agent' prevented the vacuum arising. The commonly held view that nature abhorred a vacuum was called horror vacui. There was even speculation that even God could not create a vacuum if he wanted and the 1277 Paris condemnations of Bishop Etienne Tempier, which required there to be no restrictions on the powers of God, which led to the conclusion that God could create a vacuum if he so wished.[18] Jean Buridan reported in the 14th century that teams of ten horses could not pull open bellows when the port was sealed.[8]
The Crookes tube, used to discover and study cathode rays, was an evolution of the Geissler tube. The 17th century saw the first attempts to quantify measurements of partial vacuum.[19] Evangelista Torricelli's mercury barometer of 1643 and Blaise Pascal's experiments both demonstrated a partial vacuum.
In 1654, Otto von Guericke invented the first vacuum pump[20] and conducted his famous Magdeburg hemispheres experiment, showing that teams of horses could not separate two hemispheres from which the air had been partially evacuated. Robert Boyle improved Guericke's design and with the help of Robert Hooke further developed vacuum pump technology. Thereafter, research into the partial vacuum lapsed until 1850 when August Toepler invented the Toepler Pump and Heinrich Geissler invented the mercury displacement pump in 1855, achieving a partial vacuum of about 10 Pa (0.1 Torr). A number of electrical properties become observable at this vacuum level, which renewed interest in further research.
While outer space provides the most rarefied example of a naturally occurring partial vacuum, the heavens were originally thought to be seamlessly filled by a rigid indestructible material called aether. Borrowing somewhat from the pneuma of Stoic physics, aether came to be regarded as the rarefied air from which it took its name, (see Aether (mythology)). Early theories of light posited a ubiquitous terrestrial and celestial medium through which light propagated. Additionally, the concept informed Isaac Newton's explanations of both refraction and of radiant heat.[21] 19th century experiments into this luminiferous aether attempted to detect a minute drag on the Earth's orbit. While the Earth does, in fact, move through a relatively dense medium in comparison to that of interstellar space, the drag is so minuscule that it could not be detected. In 1912, astronomer Henry Pickering commented: "While the interstellar absorbing medium may be simply the ether, [it] is characteristic of a gas, and free gaseous molecules are certainly there".[22]
Later, in 1930, Paul Dirac proposed a model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles possessing negative energy, called the Dirac sea. This theory helped refine the predictions of his earlier formulated Dirac equation, and successfully predicted the existence of the positron, confirmed two years later. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle formulated in 1927, predict a fundamental limit within which instantaneous position and momentum, or energy and time can be measured. This has far reaching consequences on the "emptiness" of space between particles. In the late 20th century, so-called virtual particles that arise spontaneously from empty space were confirmed.
Classical field theories
This subsection needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Vacuum" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The strictest criterion to define a vacuum is a region of space and time where all the components of the stress–energy tensor are zero. This means that this region is devoid of energy and momentum, and by consequence, it must be empty of particles and other physical fields (such as electromagnetism) that contain energy and momentum.
Gravity
This subsection needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Vacuum" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In general relativity, a vanishing stress–energy tensor implies, through Einstein field equations, the vanishing of all the components of the Ricci tensor. Vacuum does not mean that the curvature of space-time is necessarily flat: the gravitational field can still produce curvature in a vacuum in the form of tidal forces and gravitational waves (technically, these phenomena are the components of the Weyl tensor). The black hole (with zero electric charge) is an elegant example of a region completely "filled" with vacuum, but still showing a strong curvature.
Electromagnetism In classical electromagnetism, the vacuum of free space, or sometimes just free space or perfect vacuum, is a standard reference medium for electromagnetic effects.[23][24] Some authors refer to this reference medium as classical vacuum,[23] a terminology intended to separate this concept from QED vacuum or QCD vacuum, where vacuum fluctuations can produce transient virtual particle densities and a relative permittivity and relative permeability that are not identically unity.[25][26][27]
In the theory of classical electromagnetism, free space has the following properties:
Electromagnetic radiation travels, when unobstructed, at the speed of light, the defined value 299,792,458 m/s in SI units.[28] The superposition principle is always exactly true.[29] For example, the electric potential generated by two charges is the simple addition of the potentials generated by each charge in isolation. The value of the electric field at any point around these two charges is found by calculating the vector sum of the two electric fields from each of the charges acting alone. The permittivity and permeability are exactly the electric constant ε0[30] and magnetic constant μ0,[31] respectively (in SI units), or exactly 1 (in Gaussian units). The characteristic impedance (η) equals the impedance of free space Z0 ≈ 376.73 Ω.[32] The vacuum of classical electromagnetism can be viewed as an idealized electromagnetic medium with the constitutive relations in SI units:[33]
{\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {D}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)=\varepsilon _{0}{\boldsymbol {E}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,} {\boldsymbol {D}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)=\varepsilon _{0}{\boldsymbol {E}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\, {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {H}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)={\frac {1}{\mu _{0}}}{\boldsymbol {B}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,} {\boldsymbol {H}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)={\frac {1}{\mu _{0}}}{\boldsymbol {B}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\, relating the electric displacement field D to the electric field E and the magnetic field or H-field H to the magnetic induction or B-field B. Here r is a spatial location and t is time.
Quantum mechanics Further information: QED vacuum, QCD vacuum, and Vacuum state File:Vacuum fluctuations revealed through spontaneous parametric down-conversion.ogv A video of an experiment showing vacuum fluctuations (in the red ring) amplified by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. In quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, the vacuum is defined as the state (that is, the solution to the equations of the theory) with the lowest possible energy (the ground state of the Hilbert space). In quantum electrodynamics this vacuum is referred to as 'QED vacuum' to distinguish it from the vacuum of quantum chromodynamics, denoted as QCD vacuum. QED vacuum is a state with no matter particles (hence the name), and also no photons. As described above, this state is impossible to achieve experimentally. (Even if every matter particle could somehow be removed from a volume, it would be impossible to eliminate all the blackbody photons.) Nonetheless, it provides a good model for realizable vacuum, and agrees with a number of experimental observations as described next.
QED vacuum has interesting and complex properties. In QED vacuum, the electric and magnetic fields have zero average values, but their variances are not zero.[34] As a result, QED vacuum contains vacuum fluctuations (virtual particles that hop into and out of existence), and a finite energy called vacuum energy. Vacuum fluctuations are an essential and ubiquitous part of quantum field theory. Some experimentally verified effects of vacuum fluctuations include spontaneous emission and the Lamb shift.[18] Coulomb's law and the electric potential in vacuum near an electric charge are modified.[35]
Theoretically, in QCD multiple vacuum states can coexist.[36] The starting and ending of cosmological inflation is thought to have arisen from transitions between different vacuum states. For theories obtained by quantization of a classical theory, each stationary point of the energy in the configuration space gives rise to a single vacuum. String theory is believed to have a huge number of vacua – the so-called string theory landscape.
Outer space Main article: Outer space
Outer space is not a perfect vacuum, but a tenuous plasma awash with charged particles, free elements such as hydrogen, helium and oxygen, electromagnetic fields, and the occasional star. Outer space has very low density and pressure, and is the closest physical approximation of a perfect vacuum. But no vacuum is truly perfect, not even in interstellar space, where there are still a few hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.[5]
Stars, planets, and moons keep their atmospheres by gravitational attraction, and as such, atmospheres have no clearly delineated boundary: the density of atmospheric gas simply decreases with distance from the object. The Earth's atmospheric pressure drops to about 3.2×10−2 Pa at 100 kilometres (62 mi) of altitude,[37] the Kármán line, which is a common definition of the boundary with outer space. Beyond this line, isotropic gas pressure rapidly becomes insignificant when compared to radiation pressure from the Sun and the dynamic pressure of the solar winds, so the definition of pressure becomes difficult to interpret. The thermosphere in this range has large gradients of pressure, temperature and composition, and varies greatly due to space weather. Astrophysicists prefer to use number density to describe these environments, in units of particles per cubic centimetre.
But although it meets the definition of outer space, the atmospheric density within the first few hundred kilometers above the Kármán line is still sufficient to produce significant drag on satellites. Most artificial satellites operate in this region called low Earth orbit and must fire their engines every couple of weeks or a few times a year (depending on solar activity).[38] The drag here is low enough that it could theoretically be overcome by radiation pressure on solar sails, a proposed propulsion system for interplanetary travel.[citation needed] Planets are too massive for their trajectories to be significantly affected by these forces, although their atmospheres are eroded by the solar winds.
All of the observable universe is filled with large numbers of photons, the so-called cosmic background radiation, and quite likely a correspondingly large number of neutrinos. The current temperature of this radiation is about 3 K, or −270 degrees Celsius or −454 degrees Fahrenheit.
8 Effects on humans and animals
9 Examples
10 See also
11 References
12 External links
Etymology
The word vacuum comes from Latin, meaning 'an empty space, void', noun use of neuter of vacuus, meaning "empty", related to vacare, meaning "be empty".
Vacuum is one of the few words in the English language that contains two consecutive letters 'u'.[7]
Historical interpretation
Historically, there has been much dispute over whether such a thing as a vacuum can exist. Ancient Greek philosophers debated the existence of a vacuum, or void, in the context of atomism, which posited void and atom as the fundamental explanatory elements of physics. Following Plato, even the abstract concept of a featureless void faced considerable skepticism: it could not be apprehended by the senses, it could not, itself, provide additional explanatory power beyond the physical volume with which it was commensurate and, by definition, it was quite literally nothing at all, which cannot rightly be said to exist. Aristotle believed that no void could occur naturally, because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill any incipient rarity that might give rise to a void.
In his Physics, book IV, Aristotle offered numerous arguments against the void: for example, that motion through a medium which offered no impediment could continue ad infinitum, there being no reason that something would come to rest anywhere in particular. Although Lucretius argued for the existence of vacuum in the first century BC and Hero of Alexandria tried unsuccessfully to create an artificial vacuum in the first century AD,[8] it was European scholars such as Roger Bacon, Blasius of Parma and Walter Burley in the 13th and 14th century who focused considerable attention on these issues. Eventually following Stoic physics in this instance, scholars from the 14th century onward increasingly departed from the Aristotelian perspective in favor of a supernatural void beyond the confines of the cosmos itself, a conclusion widely acknowledged by the 17th century, which helped to segregate natural and theological concerns.[9]
Almost two thousand years after Plato, René Descartes also proposed a geometrically based alternative theory of atomism, without the problematic nothing–everything dichotomy of void and atom. Although Descartes agreed with the contemporary position, that a vacuum does not occur in nature, the success of his namesake coordinate system and more implicitly, the spatial–corporeal component of his metaphysics would come to define the philosophically modern notion of empty space as a quantified extension of volume. By the ancient definition however, directional information and magnitude were conceptually distinct.
Torricelli's mercury barometer produced one of the first sustained vacuums in a laboratory.
In the medieval Middle Eastern world, the physicist and Islamic scholar, Al-Farabi (Alpharabius, 872–950), conducted a small experiment concerning the existence of vacuum, in which he investigated handheld plungers in water.[10][unreliable source?] He concluded that air's volume can expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept of perfect vacuum was incoherent.[11] However, according to Nader El-Bizri, the physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965–1039) and the Mu'tazili theologians disagreed with Aristotle and Al-Farabi, and they supported the existence of a void. Using geometry, Ibn al-Haytham mathematically demonstrated that place (al-makan) is the imagined three-dimensional void between the inner surfaces of a containing body.[12] According to Ahmad Dallal, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī also states that "there is no observable evidence that rules out the possibility of vacuum".[13] The suction pump later appeared in Europe from the 15th century.[14][15][16]
Medieval thought experiments into the idea of a vacuum considered whether a vacuum was present, if only for an instant, between two flat plates when they were rapidly separated.[17] There was much discussion of whether the air moved in quickly enough as the plates were separated, or, as Walter Burley postulated, whether a 'celestial agent' prevented the vacuum arising. The commonly held view that nature abhorred a vacuum was called horror vacui. There was even speculation that even God could not create a vacuum if he wanted and the 1277 Paris condemnations of Bishop Etienne Tempier, which required there to be no restrictions on the powers of God, which led to the conclusion that God could create a vacuum if he so wished.[18] Jean Buridan reported in the 14th century that teams of ten horses could not pull open bellows when the port was sealed.[8]
The Crookes tube, used to discover and study cathode rays, was an evolution of the Geissler tube.
The 17th century saw the first attempts to quantify measurements of partial vacuum.[19] Evangelista Torricelli's mercury barometer of 1643 and Blaise Pascal's experiments both demonstrated a partial vacuum.
In 1654, Otto von Guericke invented the first vacuum pump[20] and conducted his famous Magdeburg hemispheres experiment, showing that teams of horses could not separate two hemispheres from which the air had been partially evacuated. Robert Boyle improved Guericke's design and with the help of Robert Hooke further developed vacuum pump technology. Thereafter, research into the partial vacuum lapsed until 1850 when August Toepler invented the Toepler Pump and Heinrich Geissler invented the mercury displacement pump in 1855, achieving a partial vacuum of about 10 Pa (0.1 Torr). A number of electrical properties become observable at this vacuum level, which renewed interest in further research.
While outer space provides the most rarefied example of a naturally occurring partial vacuum, the heavens were originally thought to be seamlessly filled by a rigid indestructible material called aether. Borrowing somewhat from the pneuma of Stoic physics, aether came to be regarded as the rarefied air from which it took its name, (see Aether (mythology)). Early theories of light posited a ubiquitous terrestrial and celestial medium through which light propagated. Additionally, the concept informed Isaac Newton's explanations of both refraction and of radiant heat.[21] 19th century experiments into this luminiferous aether attempted to detect a minute drag on the Earth's orbit. While the Earth does, in fact, move through a relatively dense medium in comparison to that of interstellar space, the drag is so minuscule that it could not be detected. In 1912, astronomer Henry Pickering commented: "While the interstellar absorbing medium may be simply the ether, [it] is characteristic of a gas, and free gaseous molecules are certainly there".[22]
Later, in 1930, Paul Dirac proposed a model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles possessing negative energy, called the Dirac sea. This theory helped refine the predictions of his earlier formulated Dirac equation, and successfully predicted the existence of the positron, confirmed two years later. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle formulated in 1927, predict a fundamental limit within which instantaneous position and momentum, or energy and time can be measured. This has far reaching consequences on the "emptiness" of space between particles. In the late 20th century, so-called virtual particles that arise spontaneously from empty space were confirmed.
Classical field theories
This subsection needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Vacuum" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
The strictest criterion to define a vacuum is a region of space and time where all the components of the stress–energy tensor are zero. This means that this region is devoid of energy and momentum, and by consequence, it must be empty of particles and other physical fields (such as electromagnetism) that contain energy and momentum.
Gravity
This subsection needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Vacuum" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
In general relativity, a vanishing stress–energy tensor implies, through Einstein field equations, the vanishing of all the components of the Ricci tensor. Vacuum does not mean that the curvature of space-time is necessarily flat: the gravitational field can still produce curvature in a vacuum in the form of tidal forces and gravitational waves (technically, these phenomena are the components of the Weyl tensor). The black hole (with zero electric charge) is an elegant example of a region completely "filled" with vacuum, but still showing a strong curvature.
Electromagnetism
In classical electromagnetism, the vacuum of free space, or sometimes just free space or perfect vacuum, is a standard reference medium for electromagnetic effects.[23][24] Some authors refer to this reference medium as classical vacuum,[23] a terminology intended to separate this concept from QED vacuum or QCD vacuum, where vacuum fluctuations can produce transient virtual particle densities and a relative permittivity and relative permeability that are not identically unity.[25][26][27]
In the theory of classical electromagnetism, free space has the following properties:
Electromagnetic radiation travels, when unobstructed, at the speed of light, the defined value 299,792,458 m/s in SI units.[28]
The superposition principle is always exactly true.[29] For example, the electric potential generated by two charges is the simple addition of the potentials generated by each charge in isolation. The value of the electric field at any point around these two charges is found by calculating the vector sum of the two electric fields from each of the charges acting alone.
The permittivity and permeability are exactly the electric constant ε0[30] and magnetic constant μ0,[31] respectively (in SI units), or exactly 1 (in Gaussian units).
The characteristic impedance (η) equals the impedance of free space Z0 ≈ 376.73 Ω.[32]
The vacuum of classical electromagnetism can be viewed as an idealized electromagnetic medium with the constitutive relations in SI units:[33]
{\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {D}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)=\varepsilon _{0}{\boldsymbol {E}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,} {\boldsymbol {D}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)=\varepsilon _{0}{\boldsymbol {E}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,
{\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {H}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)={\frac {1}{\mu _{0}}}{\boldsymbol {B}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,} {\boldsymbol {H}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)={\frac {1}{\mu _{0}}}{\boldsymbol {B}}({\boldsymbol {r}},\ t)\,
relating the electric displacement field D to the electric field E and the magnetic field or H-field H to the magnetic induction or B-field B. Here r is a spatial location and t is time.
Quantum mechanics
Further information: QED vacuum, QCD vacuum, and Vacuum state
File:Vacuum fluctuations revealed through spontaneous parametric down-conversion.ogv
A video of an experiment showing vacuum fluctuations (in the red ring) amplified by spontaneous parametric down-conversion.
In quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, the vacuum is defined as the state (that is, the solution to the equations of the theory) with the lowest possible energy (the ground state of the Hilbert space). In quantum electrodynamics this vacuum is referred to as 'QED vacuum' to distinguish it from the vacuum of quantum chromodynamics, denoted as QCD vacuum. QED vacuum is a state with no matter particles (hence the name), and also no photons. As described above, this state is impossible to achieve experimentally. (Even if every matter particle could somehow be removed from a volume, it would be impossible to eliminate all the blackbody photons.) Nonetheless, it provides a good model for realizable vacuum, and agrees with a number of experimental observations as described next.
QED vacuum has interesting and complex properties. In QED vacuum, the electric and magnetic fields have zero average values, but their variances are not zero.[34] As a result, QED vacuum contains vacuum fluctuations (virtual particles that hop into and out of existence), and a finite energy called vacuum energy. Vacuum fluctuations are an essential and ubiquitous part of quantum field theory. Some experimentally verified effects of vacuum fluctuations include spontaneous emission and the Lamb shift.[18] Coulomb's law and the electric potential in vacuum near an electric charge are modified.[35]
Theoretically, in QCD multiple vacuum states can coexist.[36] The starting and ending of cosmological inflation is thought to have arisen from transitions between different vacuum states. For theories obtained by quantization of a classical theory, each stationary point of the energy in the configuration space gives rise to a single vacuum. String theory is believed to have a huge number of vacua – the so-called string theory landscape.
Outer space
Main article: Outer space
Outer space is not a perfect vacuum, but a tenuous plasma awash with charged particles, free elements such as hydrogen, helium and oxygen, electromagnetic fields, and the occasional star.
Outer space has very low density and pressure, and is the closest physical approximation of a perfect vacuum. But no vacuum is truly perfect, not even in interstellar space, where there are still a few hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.[5]
Stars, planets, and moons keep their atmospheres by gravitational attraction, and as such, atmospheres have no clearly delineated boundary: the density of atmospheric gas simply decreases with distance from the object. The Earth's atmospheric pressure drops to about 3.2×10−2 Pa at 100 kilometres (62 mi) of altitude,[37] the Kármán line, which is a common definition of the boundary with outer space. Beyond this line, isotropic gas pressure rapidly becomes insignificant when compared to radiation pressure from the Sun and the dynamic pressure of the solar winds, so the definition of pressure becomes difficult to interpret. The thermosphere in this range has large gradients of pressure, temperature and composition, and varies greatly due to space weather. Astrophysicists prefer to use number density to describe these environments, in units of particles per cubic centimetre.
But although it meets the definition of outer space, the atmospheric density within the first few hundred kilometers above the Kármán line is still sufficient to produce significant drag on satellites. Most artificial satellites operate in this region called low Earth orbit and must fire their engines every couple of weeks or a few times a year (depending on solar activity).[38] The drag here is low enough that it could theoretically be overcome by radiation pressure on solar sails, a proposed propulsion system for interplanetary travel.[citation needed] Planets are too massive for their trajectories to be significantly affected by these forces, although their atmospheres are eroded by the solar winds.
All of the observable universe is filled with large numbers of photons, the so-called cosmic background radiation, and quite likely a correspondingly large number of neutrinos. The current temperature of this radiation is about 3 K, or −270 degrees Celsius or −454 degrees Fahrenheit.