Just read somewhere that fire is unique to earth, I don’t understand
In: Chemistry
Fire is a rapid, self-sustaining oxidation reaction. Oxygen combines with fuel to produce excess heat, catalyzing more oxidation reactions in an ongoing cycle.
Fire is not “unique to Earth”, it can occur anywhere in the universe where there is free oxygen and things for it to combine with. However oxygen being a significant component of an atmosphere is rare because it is so reactive, so without life continually replenishing it there wouldn’t be any oxygen for fire.
Fire is not realy unique to earth, but it requires oxygen(O2) something that does not naturaly occure on other planets, because its produced by plants here on earth.
And fire can contain or produce plasma, but the light itself is not only plasma its just hot gas thats hot enough to glow.
Fire isn’t plasma because fire isn’t a substance. Fire, the process of organic compounds reacting with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O, is just that: a process. An event. An occurrence. When I fry a steak, is that process solid, liquid, or gas? It’s kind of hard to answer, right? A process can’t have a state of matter.
Fire is basically a combination of very hot solid particles, gasses, and vapours produced by a chemical reaction called oxidation. At least, that’s what the flame, the visible part of fire, is. I believe that sufficiently hot fires can produce plasma but those aren’t the kinds of fires most people deal with on a day to day basis.
There’s two things you need to distinguish here: “Fire” and “flame”.
“Fire” describes the actual chemical process of fuel burning away. “Flame” is the visible result of that burn, just the water vapour and carbon monoxide/dioxide that result from the burning, so hot they glow.
If the flame gets hot enough, some parts of it might turn into plasma, but that’s not universally true.
Ions. Fire can ionize the air surrounding it. When a substance burns, it releases energy in the form of heat and light. This energy can be intense enough to strip electrons from the atoms in the air, creating charged particles known as ions. This process is called ionization. The presence of ions can affect the behavior of the surrounding air, and can also contribute to the color and behavior of the flames.
Fire is a rapid chemical reaction between a fuel (like wood or gas) and oxygen in the air. It produces heat and light. While fire isn’t plasma, it is a hot gas. The unique conditions on Earth, like our atmosphere, make fire possible. It’s like a dance between different elements that creates the flames we see.
About the light you see:
When things burn in a fire, the heat makes the atoms in the burning material move really fast. These fast-moving atoms give off light and heat energy. So, the light in a fire comes from the super energetic atoms created during the burning process.
The glow of fire is actually microscopic particles of carbon soot and gasses glowing (incandescing) from the heat released by the break down of the thing on fire. It spreads upwards because hot air rises, and the microscopic soot particles are so small and light they are carried on the rising air as they glow from their heat. Similar to how metal glows when it is heated. Everything in the “system” creating a fire still has atoms with their electrons firmly attached. That’s not the case for plasma.
Plasma is a state of matter with so much energy that the electrons break free of their atoms. Think of the amount of energy a lightning bolt has, the bolt itself is the air turned to plasma. That’s the kind of energy we’re talking about, and those bolts only last a fraction of a second. Think of how much energy would be required to turn wood into plasma for even a whole minute. The heat would be so great you wouldn’t be able to stand anywhere near this hypothetical plasma “fire.”
Fire isn’t wholely unique to Earth. It’s just Earth is one of the few planets we know of with an oxygen atmosphere. It’s also the only planet we know of with substances that are stable until exposed to enough energy, then they decompose rapidly in oxygen. The actual chemical reaction that causes flames can happen anywhere. In fact if we define that reaction by what is happening at the atomic level with the combining of oxygen and other atoms with the release of energy, then we have what is known as an “oxidation reduction” reaction, and that kind of reaction is the same one that causes rust to form on exposed metals. That kind of reaction can happen almost anywhere, even in the vacuum of space if an oxygen containing molecule touches something that it can combine with.
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