By depicting herself as male, she would become the living embodiment of Horus, a male god. As a male, she could replace the ‘image’ or ‘look’ of Thutmosis III in the religious state rituals which only a king could perform. Hatshepsut felt the need to present herself in her fathers footsteps.

Most of the Fayum Mummy portraits were executed on thin rectangular wooden panels or boards, cut from cedar, cypress, oak, lime, sycamore and citrus. Very occasionally, portraits were painted directly onto canvas or the mummy cloth itself, a technique known as cartonnage painting.

About 900 mummy portraits are known at present. The majority were found in the necropolis of Faiyum. Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colours seemingly unfaded by time.

How the Pyramids at Giza were built is one of Egypt’s biggest mysteries. The Giza Pyramids, built to endure an eternity, have done just that. The monumental tombs are relics of Egypt’s Old Kingdom era and were constructed some 4,500 years ago. Egypt’s pharaohs expected to become gods in the afterlife.

Archaeologists believe Egypt’s large pyramids are the work of the Old Kingdom society that rose to prominence in the Nile Valley after 3000 B.C. Historical analysis tells us that the Egyptians built the Giza Pyramids in a span of 85 years between 2589 and 2504 BC.

The zircon crystals from Australia’s Jack Hills are believed to be the oldest thing ever discovered on Earth. Researchers have dated the crystals to about 4.375 billion years ago, just 165 million years after the Earth formed. The zircons provide insight into what the early conditions on Earth were like.

GN-z11 is currently the oldest and most distant known galaxy in the observable universe. GN-z11 has a spectroscopic redshift of z = 11.09, which corresponds to a proper distance of approximately 32 billion light-years (9.8 billion parsecs)….

Supermassive black holes are strange. The biggest black hole discovered so far weighs in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun, or 20 times the size of the solar system. Whereas the outer planets in our solar system orbit once in 250 years, this much more massive object spins once every three months./span>

The dead star at the center of the Red Spider Nebula has a surface temperature of 250,000 degrees F, which is 25 times the temperature of the Sun’s surface. This white dwarf may, indeed, be the hottest object in the universe./span>

So massive stars become neutron stars – the heaviest things in the universe – and even more massive stars become black holes./span>

The point at which tidal forces destroy an object or kill a person will depend on the black hole’s size. For small black holes whose Schwarzschild radius is much closer to the singularity, the tidal forces would kill even before the astronaut reaches the event horizon.

44 °C (111.2 °F) or more – Almost certainly death will occur; however, people have been known to survive up to 46.5 °C (115.7 °F). 43 °C (109.4 °F) – Normally death, or there may be serious brain damage, continuous convulsions and shock. Cardio-respiratory collapse will likely occur.

Lava is the hottest natural thing on Earth. It comes from the Earth’s mantle or crust. The layer closer to the surface is mostly liquid, spiking to an astounding 12,000 degrees and occasionally seeping out to create lava flows./span>

Boomerang Nebula

Ice XIV

Deep down at the very bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, geochemist Andrea Koschinsky has found something truly extraordinary: “It’s water,” she says, “but not as we know it.” At over 3 kilometres beneath the surface, sitting atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, it’s the hottest water ever found on Earth./span>

Lightning is four times hotter than the sun. The surface of the sun is around 11,000 degrees F. Scientists determined that temperature more than 20 years ago by examining the light given off by a bolt of lightning.

Yes, Carys; there are lots of places in our Universe where it’s much hotter than the Sun. Our Sun is a giant ball of gas that is 6000 degrees Celsius at the surface and millions of degrees in the centre. Some stars are much bigger than our Sun (and weigh a lot more too), and are even hotter inside./span>

Absolute hot is a theoretical upper limit to the thermodynamic temperature scale, conceived as an opposite to absolute zero.

108.14°F

Summary: On the absolute temperature scale, which is used by physicists and is also called the Kelvin scale, it is not possible to go below zero – at least not in the sense of getting colder than zero kelvin. At zero kelvin (minus 273 degrees Celsius) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears./span>

The official highest recorded temperature is now 56.7°C (134°F), which was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California, USA./span>

August 16

There’s a catch, though: absolute zero is impossible to reach. The reason has to do with the amount of work necessary to remove heat from a substance, which increases substantially the colder you try to go. To reach zero kelvins, you would require an infinite amount of work./span>