• Question: What will happen if i spill water in space?

    Asked by to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 18 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Hi wikiboss
      Water will float about if you spill it.

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      If you’re in a pressurised environment, like the ISS, not a lot really. You end up with drops of water floating around you.

      In the vacuum of space, there are two things the water will try to do simultaneously: boil (as there’s no pressure) and freeze (due to the low temperature). Which occurs is dependent on a few things (like the size of the water drops), but I think typically it freezes.

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      I like this question because, before I got into biology, I spent one summer working in an astrophysical chemistry lab. This is also a good question because, if you think about it, there are several things that could happen. Firstly, space is very cold, so you might expect it to freeze. Then, on the other hand, space has a very low pressure, almost zero, so you might expect it to boil. Then again, water has very high surface tension (the force that keeps the liquid together), so you might expect it to stay as a liquid and float around like a glob.

      It isn’t immediately obvious which of these factors is most important, especially to someone who isn’t a physical chemist, so the best way to settle this is with an experiment. If you try this, what you would see at first is that the water boils, because it is in a vacuum. However, the process of boiling takes heat energy away from the liquid, which gets colder and then freezes. So, ultimately, the water does freeze, but not because of how cold space is.

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