Comment on But I am mighty!!
krashmo@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThe 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.
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.
Thanks. I completely forgot that the standard suntan or sunburn is caused by UV rays. A fireplace doesn’t create UV rays.
TauZero@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
@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.
xavier666@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Note to self - Don’t sit near a magnesium fireplace if you don’t want to tan your bones, which are exposed by the flesh getting melted off by the said fireplace.