Eli5, if I left some valuable collectible, say, a car or a paining in am hermetically sealed room filled with pure argon and nothing else, and had it completely protected from UV radiation, would it ever decay or degrade?

Question

Eli5, if I left some valuable collectible, say, a car or a paining in am hermetically sealed room filled with pure argon and nothing else, and had it completely protected from UV radiation, would it ever decay or degrade?

In: 121

Answer 1

Not in a way that matters unless you want to use a scanning electron microscope analysis of the surface, but even metals can have atoms evaporate. It’s just very, very slow. That can then potentially find a hole it could escape though to the outside.

For a painting, the heat could damage the pigment depending on what it is, and that’d be a lot faster than a car but still probably not fast enough to matter within your lifespan.