When air gets sucked out from a spacestation or whatever, where does the sucked out air go ?
In: Planetary Science
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.
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