On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:49:53 -0700, Crown-Horned Snorkack
wrote:

And Earth is forever warmer than background. However, geothermal heat
is negligible compared to incident light of Sun.

Not so. The Earth gives up more heat than it receives from the Sun. It
is slowly cooling. The Sun provides nowhere near enough energy to heat
the Earth above its current temperature. Don't confuse the temperature
of the Earth as a whole, which is determined by residual heat of
formation and by internal radioactive processes, with the surface and
atmospheric temperature, which is determined largely by solar radiation.

Would the white dwarf cool to a point where its loss of internal heat
is smaller than the incident relict radiation?

Again, that would violate the second law. Heat flows from warm to cold,
not the other way. The white dwarf will spend eternity with its
temperature asymptotically approaching its surrounding temperature. It
can never get colder than the background, unless some cosmic
refrigerator comes along and actively pumps heat out of it.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com