you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hypothetically speaking, will you get sunburnt if you sit near a fire all day?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The heat could dry out your skin, which, if I'm not mistaken, is essentially what a burn is. However, as the other person noted, a sunburn is damage from radiation, not heat. So I think you could stretch the common definition of a burn to call heat induced dry skin a burn but calling it a sunburn would not be accurate.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @xavier666@lemm.ee If you sit at a magnesium fire, it burns at 3300K, which is hot enough to produce sizeable ultraviolet rays. So you can get your sunburn from that, damaging the DNA in whatever of your remaining cells have not been melted away by heat.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Heat is also (thermal) radiation. So is light, radio waves, microwaves, etc. However, the radiation from a fire or the other stuff I mentioned isn't ionizing, so unless the heat itself does damage it won't do cellular damage.

    You also give off thermal radiation, but so does anything higher temp than absolute zero.

  • source
  • parent