Metallica_Band

Hey there...I've always wondered about this question:

Everyone knows that when you go into space that there is zero gravity...stuff floats...even you...now if you take some water and pour it into the space ship with zero gravity then it just floats and wobbles in blobs of water...

Now what if you do the same thing but with fire??? How does fire react to zero gravity??? Does it form little blobs of fireballs??? Now this is supposing that the ship DOES have oxygen cause you can have oxygen and have no gravity...and also fire needs oxygen to live...so what would happen to fire in zero gravity??? THANX
C'YA ?:-D

leakie

check this (pic at bottom of page): http://science.howstuffworks.com/fire1.htm

pretty cool.

Noob

everything naturally forms into a sphere in zero gravity

fckm

everything?
well, lets see, the sphere encompasses the largest volume using the least surface area. Any 'material' where the surface is at higher potential than the bulk should (giving that it's already in a high enough energy state) form a sphere in zero gravity. Although I'm thinking that fire being spherical has less to do w/ potential energy and more to do w/ convection.

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B21

Most likely the fire would cause the ship to blow up since they use pure oxygen in the space shuttle.

Lebell

No.

NASA hasn't used pure oxygen since the disasterous Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule during a training session on Jan 27, 1967.

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B21

Oh i thought they still used it.

cj2112

here is a pic of fire in microgravity, the credit for the pic on the site i got it from was given to NASA

soccerchamp76

Pretty cool. Zero-gravity would be awesome to be in for a couple days

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B21

i agree, could u imagine sex in zero-gravity?......

89transam

yea prolly akward

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Fire

As far as I know I would retain my shape

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TIO

...which wouldn't have happened either if the American and Soviet space programmes had shared even the smallest amounts of information. The Soviets figured out that you needed to dilute the oxygen to prevent fires long before Apollo I.

The 'natural' shape for a flame plasma is spherical. On Earth, the heat causes a convection current around the flame, causing the familiar tapered shape. In the absence of gravity, the less dense air around the plasma will not move 'up,' so the convection current will not form and the flame will remain spherical.
In the absence of the convection current, the flame will quite quickly use up all of the oxygen nearby, and go out.

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Moskie

A friend of mine took this one course offered at the University of Maryland.... i forget the name of the course, but one lecture was devoted to reproduction in a zero-grav/space environment. He said it was awesome, the professor talked about a bunch of sex toys they had to use to keep the people from thrusting the other person across the room

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Church

LOL, what a useless but cool study. What would we possibly need to know about sex is zero grav for? lol

shakran

"In the absence of the convection current, the flame will quite quickly use up all of the oxygen nearby, and go out."

Actually, not true. That's what everyone thought until they set small fires in an experiment on the space shuttle. They kept burning until the preprogramed extinguisher kicked in. They were planning to do it again without artificially extinguishing it, but then Columbia happened. . .

JStrider

i bet it would look cool to light a ball of lighter fluid on fire... really get the sphere thing going...

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numist

and the lighter fluid would be in a ball shape too!
then you could throw the flaming ball of fluid at a fellow astronaut and watch him freak out as the malotov minus bottle hits him

or maybe not....

BubblegumTeflon

Why don't you take a look at that big burny thing. You know. that one in the sky. That might tell you.


Hey it's just a joke relax.

meepa

Actually, no one is supposed to do this. Any picture you see of it was doctored by propagandists. If this was actually done, the universe would collapse in on itself, and the mighty Space Gerbils would laugh at us.

Doesn't Matter

Wouldnt there be no fire?

Cuz you can only have no gravity in a vacuum like thing, where theres no gravity.

I dunno..im confused.

Does it really matter?

shakran

you can have air without gravity. Ask the astronauts on the space station.

Sunrise

No, there should still be a fire.

Supple Cow

But isn't fire just a parcel of air that's been heated? You know, the part of it that's so hot that it joins the visible spectrum of colors? I'm not disagreeing that this parcel of air would then turn into a sphere in zero gravity, I'm just having trouble wrapping my brain around the fact that we're talking about fire like it's a substance in and of itself.

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shakran

ok, here's the explanation:


Gravity causes denser (heavier) air to sink below lighter (less dense) air.

Heat is expansionary and will tend to flow from high to low density areas.

Since on earth, under gravity, the low density areas are higher than the high density areas, fire tends to go upwards.

But in zero gravity, the air's equally dense everywhere. Fire doesn't have anywhere to flow to, because there are no areas of lower density, so it stays in its natural state, which is a sphere. If you installed a vaccum generator above the fire (say, a ducted fan that sucks air out of the room the fire's in) (after all, all a fan does is create an area of low pressure into which the air around it flows, which creates the breeze) then the fire will head toward the low pressure area generated by the fan, and will look pretty much like fire on earth. If you stuck the fan below the fire, you'd get upside down fire