5 Daily Life phenomena that go completely bizarre in Space !

1. Flames turn into glowing orbs of fire!

Astronaut A : What was it that I just saw?

Astronaut B : Seemed to me like a 'fire bubble'!

If you think the conversation above is outright stupid and weird, blame it on physics because this is precisely how flames behave in zero gravity - they turn into glowing spheres acquiring the appearance of fire bubbles.

Credit: YouTube

The familiar teardrop shape of the flame is because, in the presence of gravity here on earth, the fire forces hot air to move upward. Whereas in zero gravity, the flame just expands evenly in all directions taking a globular shape.

So, the next time you watch Gravity, do not forget to notice how Sandra Bullock gets tossed around the space shuttle as a mad spherical fire engulfs everything that comes its way. And this time, you know that it is physics that is driving the fire crazy!

 

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2.Water turns into jelly

If reading the above statement made you believe that Space is a magical place which turns everything on Earth into a better version of itself, then I am sorry to break your bubble because we are talking space here and not heaven! So in space, water does turn into jelly but only in appearance and behavior.

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The physics behind this strange phenomenon is quite simple. In the presence of gravity, water simply flows down and on encountering an obstacle, the thin film around it bursts. The fierce tug of war between the surface tension and gravity is won by gravity lending the trait of fluidity to water. On the other hand, in a zero gravity environment as space, it is the turn off surface tension to redeem itself. Here, water maintains its cohesiveness as there is no force pulling it down making way for surface tension to emerge as the unchallenged winner. This explains the jelly-like behavior of water in space.

3. Crying and Tragedy : Consequence becomes the Cause!

What do you do to vent out your emotions in moments of sadness and solitude? You instinctively cry it all out and apparently the shedding of those heavy tears lightens the burden of the problem you are in. Well, tell this to an astronaut during his mission and him sure as hell would beat the shit out of you once he comes back to Earth. 'Why?', you ask, because astronauts in space cannot cry when they want to. In the gravity-free environment of space, tears do not fall - they just remain on the eye forming a globbed mass in front of the cornea which is quite difficult to remove, thanks to the added property of enhanced surface tension in zero gravity. What follows is a reversal of roles between the act of crying and tragedy because here, crying might lead to a tragedy unlike the opposite that happens on Earth!!

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4. A seemingly harmless (and at times, even soothing) entity on Earth turns violent in Space!!

Have you ever wondered using sound to affect things physically, causing them to move or dance to your beats?Seems eerie, right? This, for we are accustomed to seeing the laws of physics being followed by objects on Earth in the presence of gravity. But, if we for a while remove Newton( I mean, gravity) from the picture, things change and how!

We are all aware that sound travels in the form of waves. Now if we make these sound waves hit a water droplet in space, bound only by surface tension and not gravity, there emerges a pattern of vibrations on its surface, unlike anything we see on earth. The overall effect is like a makeshift oscilloscope, with higher frequency sound forcing beads of water from the drop.

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5. Everything on Earth transmogrifies into a strange form of itself!

Earth is blessed to have been bestowed by conditions just right for the existence of life as we know it, with gravity being one of the contributing factors towards this existence. However, things get really weird when we take everything into space. Even if we create an environment which is feasible for the proliferation of life in space, the life and the life forms as we know them would cease to exist and everything would turn into a sort of a mutant of itself. Life forms adapt themselves to the environment in which they live, and on growing in an environment drastically different from that of Earth's, due to the absence of gravity, there is sure to be a change in the way the creatures evolve and what they become.

With the experiments conducted by scientists on the growth of bacteria Salmonella in zero gravity conditions, the statement above gets the seal of approval as it turned out that the bacteria loathed gravity and thrived three times more in space than on earth becoming three times more poisonous.

Courtesy : NASA