Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => That CAN'T be true! => Topic started by: ukmicky on 24/07/2005 01:36:09
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Silly question this, but my daughter ask me and I wasn’t too sure of the answer.
If I took my daughters goldfish bowl and slowly emptied the contents in space would the water hold together through surface tension or its own gravity like a large bubble and if so would her last surviving goldfish
(The other one died an early death ) be able swim around until it ran out of oxygen?
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I'm not the expert but I expect the water would immediately freeze making a nice goldfish icecube ! but let's forgive the frozen aspect , I am sure the water would disperse and fishy would find itself again in the frozen food section !....
There just would not be enough mass to contain the water in a stable ball of liquidy joy...but, lets wait for gsmollin to answer this one...what a fun question though !
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neilep
what you doing up this time of night or should i say morning, i thought i would be the only one.
she asked the question because at school she saw a film showing an astronaut sucking in a large bubble of water in one of the space shuttles.
so maybe there should be two questions
one if it was inside a spaceship with air and one for outside the spaceship in the vacuum of space.
i figured in space the sun would prevent it from freezing and unless an external force came along even A tiny amount of water would produce enough of an attraction. after all the galaxy did start out as small particals of gas and dust which bonded together through their own gravity. Maybe the water would boil away
but i could be wrong.
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Yayy !..I love seeing those clips of astronauts doing those things , but i'm positive the water would freeze outside the spaceship. Here on Earth we have the benefit of the atmosphere to retain the heat, the same I'm sure applies within the spaceship.....you'd have to be much closer to the sun I think. Lets see what the experts say.
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quote:
Originally posted by ukmicky
neilep
what you doing up this time of night or should i say morning, i thought i would be the only one.
I'm the resident Night Owl ! *sigh*
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Why would it freeze? I don't understand. I mean if is just outside the earth like on the moon surely it wouldn't freeze because the sun is there. Only if it is on the right side of the moon.
Astronaughts go in space how come they don't freeze?
Oh and another thing while we on the topic of space..... if you were in space would your head pop? That's what I was told but I am quite gullable
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quote:
Originally posted by simeonie
Why would it freeze? I don't understand. I mean if is just outside the earth like on the moon surely it wouldn't freeze because the sun is there. Only if it is on the right side of the moon.
Astronauts go in space how come they don't freeze?
Oh and another thing while we on the topic of space..... if you were in space would your head pop? That's what I was told but I am quite gullable
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astronauts don't freeze cos they're cocooned in a suit or in the space ship...
Hey !!I might be wrong...but remember , we have an atmosphere which keeps the heat in...in space...there ain't any.....
Please spacey people...answer this one for us[?]
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quote:
Originally posted by neilep
quote:
Originally posted by simeonie
Why would it freeze? I don't understand. I mean if is just outside the earth like on the moon surely it wouldn't freeze because the sun is there. Only if it is on the right side of the moon.
Astronauts go in space how come they don't freeze?
Oh and another thing while we on the topic of space..... if you were in space would your head pop? That's what I was told but I am quite gullable
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astronauts don't freeze cos they're cocooned in a suit or in the space ship...
Hey !!I might be wrong...but remember , we have an atmosphere which keeps the heat in...in space...there ain't any.....
Please spacey people...answer this one for us[?]
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Astronauts don't freeze in space because the heat output of a human body is amazingly high, their problem is staying cool, strangely. To give you an idea of how much: per square cm it's even bigger than the sun, if you divide the sun's output by its much larger volume, of course. But it's amazingly high nonetheless.
If you'd get sucked out into space without your equipment not only would your head pop, just about everything else too. The pressure difference is quite enormous. One of the most horrible ways to go, used in some sf stories for the gruesome details, which I'll spare you.
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Thanks rob...but will the water freeze ??
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It wouldn’t freeze as long as the sun was shinning on it, but as there is no pressure in space wouldn’t the waters boiling point drop causing it to disappear in a cloud of steam. But before it boiled away would it remain together as one mass and what would happen to my daughters poor goldfish.
And what would happen if the same experiment was done inside the space shuttle full of air.
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It ought to disappear into a fine frozen mist rather quickly, given the low temp and pressure.
With more solid things in full sunlight, especially closer into the sun, it also depends on whether its a dark object, and if it's rotating or not. One side could be fried while the other side freezes, quite literally. If it's spinning around it'd be literally alternatively frozen and fried for a while, which is a very destructive treatment all by itself (think uneven shrinking and expansion of material - rrrrrrrrrip).
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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When the goldfish and his bowl were ejected into space the water would boil away, and the fish would explode.
Space is a vacuum. In other words the ambient pressure is very low, so fluids boil (turn into gases) much more readily i.e. at a much lower temperature than they would here on Earth. An water-filled kettle 'boiling' at the top of Everest does so at closer to 70 degress celsius than 100 because the air pressure is much lower at 29,000 feet (the height of Everest) compared with sea level.
For this reason, if 'Goldie' the fish were blown out of the airlock, not only would the water around him boil off, but so would the water inside him, causing his body to attempt to become roughly 1000 times bigger than it was to start with (when liquids turn into gases they expand roughly 600-1000 times). It's safe to say that he would go pop.
So how does ice exist in space - such as in comets ? The reason is that space is very cold - an object shielded from the sun's radiation is at about 5 Kelvin (5 degress above absolute zero). At this temperature water molecules do not have enough energy to break away from each other and vapourise (turn into a gas), so they remain as ice. But our hypothetical goldfish astronaut would be at room temperature when he left the spacecraft, so his water molecules would be far more energetic and boil rapidly.
Chris
"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception"
- Groucho Marx
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So the outcome of the "goldfish experiment" would be different whether the suns rays were hitting it or not?
Also would we only go pop if the suns rays were hitting us? If the person was shielded by something like a random giant rock between the person and the sun what would happen? Still pop? Because there wouldn't be any heat.
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Ok so it wont freeze then !!..at least I'm man enough to accept defeat and afford you guys with the appropriae respect and cordiality *falls to floor, kicks out, screams and shouts, sticks out tongue and has a tantrum*
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To recuperate: the vacuum would make the water boil off rapidly, and it would ultimately end up as microscopic ice crystals. The goldfish would go violently pop, also from the vacuum. Sunlight has no influence on the popping, it only heats up the sun-faced side of something in space, the other side freezes. So any remains of the popped goldfish would hang in space with a cold and hot side, or if it's rotating, it would alternate freezing and frying, with the frying part being stronger the closer you get to the sun, so near Mercury the effect is much stronger than near Pluto.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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i dnt understand exactly why it would go pop though?
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well, here on earth we have air presssure to keep us contained in our fleshy bags of skin...In space , there isn't any (it's a vacuum) and this has the unfortunate effect of making our innards desperate to become outards !!.still, with my record in this thread i'm bound to be corrected soon enough ...but I think I might be right.....ish !!
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Absolutely correctish, even. It's like the diver's bends on steroids. All internal gases will expand for lack of outside pressure, imagine the total weight of the column of air currently hanging over your head. Add up its weight, and you know the exact internal pressure too, or you would collapse under its weight. So the internal pressure keeps you from being compressed under normal atmospheric pressure. Once that's gone, the internal pressure will try to balance things out again, this time to the near-zero pressure of the outside vacuum, and rather quickly too. This will make you - sorry, the goldfish - more or less explode in slow motion.
edit for slight clarification
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wow that is pretty cool. How you know all that Chimera?
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Not from firsthand experience, that's for sure. Reading, but you could figure this out from first principles, I guess. Space is freezing cold and has no pressure to speak of. All heat comes from either the sun or your own body, and as I tried to explain, that can be much more than you think, which is why you will fry yourself in a spacesuit, if you do not add a cooling system - which does not seem to make a lot of sense if you realise how cold space is.
The rest is just a speeded up version of what happens when a diver goes up for air too fast, after coming from a great depth. The gases in his blood are compressed from being at that depth, and have accustomed themselves to it. Now go up too fast, and these gases will not get enough counterpressure anymore, which means all kinds of gas dissolved in your blood will suddenly come out, resulting in all kinds of poisoning - the bends.
The difference now between 1 atmosphere (1000 hPa) and vacuum is enormous, and therefore much worse, and much faster. As Chris pointed out it's nearly a thousand times - didn't know THAT tidbit, but will keep it in mind. Three orders of magnitude. Should do the trick allright.
So this kind of exit strategy is prettty popular is some sf, for the gruesome details they can dish out.
OK, here goes, from 'The Black Ship' by Christopher Rowley, Ballantine, 1985:
'Aboard the Black Ship Ira Ganweek sweated profusely as he begged Alace Rohm for his life. Most of the Neptunian Bond lords had already been dispatched, one by one, through a private little air lock in the computer library section, and the executions had been witnessed by a picked group of Rohm's supporters, who had whooped with delight at each 'performance'.
For Ofur Muynn (a very big and strong and very much feared person in the book - chimera) they had opened the lock very slowly. He had scrabbled frantically at the door trying to retain air, trying to get back into the ship, while they laughed and laughed as his head ballooned and his body finally begun to burst.'
(remember, I warned you. And this is ofcourse the extra-excruciatingly slow edition, for those ambrosial conoisseurs of torture mechanisms among you).
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...and am I right in thinking that goldfishys innnards are blown out rather than sucked out ?
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Deep question now: what's the real diff?
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
Deep question now: what's the real diff?
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
..because of which side the pressure is at ? ie: more pressure inside fishy means innards are blown out ? it's not the vacuum sucking it's the pressure inside blowing !!...oh...I don't know !!..I'm sure I read it somewhere !
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Treat it like a legal problem in stead of a physical one: what causes what, and who's the culprit? Did the vacuum do it, or the pressure? Is 'absence' of force identical to no force, if it 'forces' the person to try and evenly spread out over the rest of creation? Or is it the internal pressure that misfires in it original purpose?
Remember, YOU asked.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
Treat it like a legal problem in stead of a physical one: what causes what, and who's the culprit? Did the vacuum do it, or the pressure? Is 'absence' of force identical to no force, if it 'forces' the person to try and evenly spread out over the rest of creation? Or is it the internal pressure that misfires in it original purpose?
Remember, YOU asked.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
I know i asked Rob !!..and now i have a headache !![:D]
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That's because it's a much harder question than most people would think, or maybe even agree on. Good you axed.
A physicist would probably say that force is force, and it's contents are blown out. Then again, if I used a suction tube with the same vacuum attached and stuck it in you, you'd probably not say so, even if the whole situation is not really different. The 'suction' tube does nothing without you delivering the pressure, right?
In the same sense, 'force' is only something you can identify meaningfully in a very strict and local sense. One Newton pushing a block of wood over my table is totally meaningless inside the Sun, for instance. From the viewpoint of the 'vacuum' there is just a infinitesimally small statistical readjustment in pressure difference, hardly worth mentioning (your attempts at screams in protest notwithstanding).
That's why when you are on Newtonian level 'force' is everything, while in quantum mechanics it all essentially boils down to taking the 'vacuum' viewpoint, that of statistical redistributions. Philosophically you find that terms like 'force' and 'blown out' or 'sucked out' are only meaningful in a very defined context.
Like that of your life ending withing a few seconds and you not caring one whit about all this crap. Not only is everything relative, according to Albert, It all depends on context.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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this is a clip of a water balloon being popped in a 0g environment on one of those parabolic flights. while not in space as sich it gives a good idea of what yould happen in a space sraft such as the ISS and hopefully answers the surface tension part of the question. and it looks cool too...
http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov/balloon/balloo01.mpg
the website the video is from...
http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/balloon/blob.htm
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Brill links...thank you very much.
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rp171 thank you.
so it seems water tension would hold it together allowing Goldie to swim around to his hearts content
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Homer simpson went into space,he was eating crisps( chips they call em that side of the water) when his head went through the ant experiment,if NASA sent me into space,they would probably get the same result,ive just got more hair than him.
every village has one !