Are vapour and steam two different states or do they refer to a single state? If they are the same, how does water get evaporated from seas and oceans without touching the 100C mark considering the change of state occurs only at 100C? What is the gaseous form of H2O known as?
Thanks in advance!
In: Physics
Evaporation refers to the random escape of liquid molecules into the gas phase at any temperature due to probabilities.
Vaporization is a direct synonym for boiling: the rapid transition of a liquid to the gas phase due to the ambient gas pressure falling below the vapor pressure of the liquid, most often because the liquid has been heated and that vapor pressure has risen to uncontainable levels.
A third term worth pointing out here is Sublimation, which is the same thing as evaporation but happens to a solid. Probabilities meaning that some atoms/molecules will just randomly escape off the surface of the solid into the gas phase. We could’ve chosen to call this by the same name as evaporation, because they’re really the same thing, but we just didn’t for arbitrary reasons.
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