When air gets sucked out from a spacestation or whatever, where does the sucked out air go ?
In: Planetary Science
It goes in to space. Space is a near vacuum so any gas that ends up there is going to spread out extremely quickly and be basically undetectable. But the movies do not usually get what a decompression like this is. A space station does not have unlimited air so there is not going to be a massive wind tunnel sucking everything out for minutes. If it is a pinhole leak the gas will go out slowly, if it is a big hole all of the gas will rush out immediately and then be gone.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The air is pulled into the vacuum of space and disperses into the nothingness until it’s so spread out it’s simply part of the near perfect vacuum of space.
Just out into deeper and deeper space.
Space is vacuum – there’s nothing out there, so the air molecules just keep going.
Imagine setting up a pool table (aka a billiards table) and breaking the big pile of balls in the middle. Inside of the space-station the balls bounce around and we can breathe them. In space, there are no bumpers – the balls just keep going forever, or at least until they run into another planet/star/moon/etc.
Out in deep space, there’s very, very little matter – estimates vary, but something like 1 molecule per cubit meter of volume is a ballpark figure.
Gases like air wants to spread out as thinly as possible. Inside a spaceship, air is held at a reasonably high pressure. When a hole opens in the ship, the air now has pretty much infinite space to spread thinly out into.
So the air doesn’t really get sucked out, it merely moves to an empty space it can attempt to fill.
It goes into space. In space, there is *very close* to nothing. That means there’s no pressure.
Technically, space isn’t sucking the air out. The Space Station is pushing the air out. The space station is basically a soda can that you shook up and suddenly opened: the pressure inside is much higher than the pressure outside, so everything inside gets pushed out.
Where does it go from there? Well, space is so large and vast that it may as well be disappearing from existence. Technically, each of those molecules is floating around in space until something with a lot of gravity pulls it in.
Air doesn’t get sucked out, it blows out. The air inside the station has a certain pressure, which means the air molecules are moving around in there and constantly bouncing off the walls with enough force to generate that amount of pressure. If you take away part of the wall, the air that would have bounced off that wall just keeps going out into space.
It goes into space and gets diluted to basically nothing in the vast volume of space.
Think of a tire that’s inflated to 50 psi. That tire is sitting around on the ground, in the earth’s atmosphere, which is exerting about 14 psi on the outside of the tire. Now, poke a hole in that tire, the air in the tire at 50 psi can now escape, which it will do very quickly, because the 14 psi outside isn’t even close to enough to hold it back. So, the air rushes out and keeps rushing out until the pressure inside drops to 14 psi, at which point things settle down to a nice happy equilibrium. That air from inside the tire just becomes a little bit more air intermingled amongst the rest of the atmosphere. The spacecraft is just a tire inflated to about 14 psi sitting in an environment where the pressure outside is 0 psi. Poke a hole in it, and the gas from the spacecraft just flows out until the pressure inside equals the 0 psi outside, and that tiny bit of gas that left the spacecraft just becomes an infinitesimal bit of gas floating around in the endless empty of space.
Kind of like when you spray an air freshener or pop a helium balloon in a large room, the gas/particles contained in those vessels immediately begin to spread out to fill the larger space that they are now contained within. Being infinitely large and a vacuum, the air in a spaceship gets pretty violently sucked out and diffuses into the void of space.
It isn’t sucked out, it is pushed out; the air leaves the station to the outside there is a positive pressure pushing out and not a negative pressure sucking it out. https://youtu.be/C57xxvBtP7o
Space is the empty area between objects gravitational fields
Gas pressure is things bouncing off walls/eachother.
So they bounce until they find an area where they can be free (there’s no walls in [space]). The only thing that could slow them down is gas resistance (other things to bounce on) but there aren’t many particles chilling in space because of the vacuum
It’s a vacuum because the particles are slowly getting sucked to the nearest source/strongest source of gravity
So to answer your question: after being expelled from the space craft, their journey will likely lead them to another gravitational object one day (or in orbit, where they will inevitably sink in
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