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No not necessarily - it will keep growing hotter until the black body radiation emitted by the probe matches the power of the radiation hitting the probe. Then it will stay at constant temperature.

It's a standard undergraduate problem to work out what this equilibrium temperature is for a flat plate at a distance from the sun equal to the Earth's orbital radius.

Interestingly the result is only a few 10's of degrees less than the average temperature of the real Earth - the difference is due to the Greenhouse Effect.

For the probe one could easily do the maths but I could believe that at 4 million miles that equilibrium temperature is 2,500F.



i definitely can't do the math myself, but excellent retort. thank you for the nuance




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