It’s not a good idea to leave certain things in your car on a hot day. Refrigerated goods, water bottles, and children are best kept out of the sun and the heat, lest they suffer or accidentally burn down your car. Thanks to a teacher at a San Francisco science museum, we can add one more to the list: giant parabolic mirrors. Don’t leave a giant parabolic mirror in your car.

If you neglect this rule, you run the risk of sunlight hitting the mirror, which is extremely bad. Unlike normal flat mirrors, which just reflect light at the same angle that it comes in, parabolic mirrors reflect all light on a single point. This feature is great for telescopes and satellite dishes, but not so great when those mirrors are sitting in your car.

Marc “Zeke” Kossover found this out the hard way when bringing his parabolic mirrors to the San Francisco Exploratorium for a demonstration. He typically uses these mirrors to demonstrate how solar ovens work. Using one of these mirrors, Kossover says he can pasteurize a liter of water in 15 minutes flat.

Apparently, these mirrors can also melt the roof of his car, too. When Kossover headed to his demonstration, he says he accidentally forgot the mirrors in the car for the afternoon. When he returned, he found the lining of his roof was less than intact.

Fortunately, that’s all the damage the car sustained. With the heat levels produced by the focused sunlight, Kossover is lucky he didn’t get a fire in his car. Instead of having to buy a whole new car, he only has to pay a $100 fee to replace the lining.

Source: The Blog of Phyz via Gizmodo

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