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... I've never been very comfortable with the "radiating to space" explanation (though it may be totally right and my intuition fails me).
In short, I have a hard time seeing how metals (or whatever) can sense a nice big heat sink out there *somewhere* and end up at a lower temperature than the surroundings.
Do they continuously suck heat out of the air and re-radiate it to the vacuum?
Taking that to the extreme, if I put a piece of metal into a "transparent" container and put it under vacuum, the metal would eventually reach the temperature of the background radiation in the universe
, unless something is coupling to the metal (conductively, convectively, or radiatively) and warming it back up. It wouldn't just hold on to its heat energy. At which distance do I need to put an insulator to keep the communication from taking place? Around Earth's atmosphere? Outside the galaxy? If so, what relativistic effects contribute to the phenomenon? I'm not sure I follow all that, but you can do the thought experiment pretty well
Is it because conductors have such a near continuum of phonon and electronic modes that they can "talk" this way? Is the communication affected by the Casimir effect?