When air gets sucked out from a spacestation or whatever, where does the sucked out air go ?
In: Planetary Science
Grab a bottle of food coloring. Fill a bathtub with water.
The bathtub is space. There’s no food coloring in space.
Drip one drop of food coloring into the tub. That’s the air that just leaked out of your space station.
If you leave the tub alone, eventually that single drop will ‘disappear’ into space.
It depends on where the space station is at the time.
If it’s in space, that’s where the air goes. It’ll likely eventually be gathered up by the gravitational pull of some celestial body, but it’s out into space to start.
If its orbit degraded and it splashed down in the sea, that’s where the air would go (likely rising to the surface and entering the atmosphere).
Wherever the space station is, that’s where the air would go initially.
It just goes out to space and spreads out until it’s so spread out that it’s practically undetectable. Realistically it simply incorporates itself to the trace amounts of air present at the highest reaches of the atmosphere. The molecules are essentially in orbit of the planet and they either fall back down into the atmosphere or they get stripped away by the sun’s radiation and swept into the cosmos.
Think of a pitcher of beer floating in the ocean. When it gets tipped over, all the beer goes out. Where does it go? Into the vast ocean. It still exists, but is so diluted, you’ll never detect it in any meaningful way.
Same thing in your example. That air gets removed from the station(“pitcher”), and diluted across an extremely vast ocean of space.
A space station is a big pressurized can in a near vacuum. Think similar to a can of air freshener in your house. More pressure inside the can than outside.
If you punch a hole in the can all the pressure inside moves to the outside very quickly. If you do this with the air freshener, all the stuff in the can dissipates into the air until after a while it’s nearly undetectable.
air in spacestation is like many plastic balls in pit (ball pool ?)
a child come in to ball pit and start to throw them out to empty room
some time later there will be no balls in pit, only in room – from where they will go to other rooms and to other rooms until u forgot they was in pit
where does air from a popped baloon go in a room?
it disperses into its environment.
Each molecule that gets sucked out (or rather blown out) will continue in the direction that it was blown out at until it hits something or else gravitational forces pull it somewhere where it might eventually hit something.
Imagine if you fired a gun in space, the bullet (and the gasses from the gunpowder) will go on forever until it hits something or is dragged into something by gravity.
Air is a combination of several different atoms and molecules. If these particles are at a temperature above absolute 0 (-273 C) then those particles are moving around.
Air is fairly non dense, but it still has a lot of pressure. The particles want to spread away from each other and not touch. This actually presses down on your body as well.
On earth, this is caused by gravity pulling air down, so the pressure is based on how much air is above you.
In a sealed container, it’s based on the amount of air in a closed system and the temperature of that air, it bounces off of every surface and other air particles.
When one of those walls is broken, other air particles push out the air around the opening. The “suction” you feel is the air away from the hole pushing air towards the hole or anything else in contact with the air. Meanwhile there is less air to push “back” because it isn’t bouncing back off the wall.
It spreads out.
Space is a vacuum, so there is a lot of empty space that can be filled.
Eventually, those atoms will either rejoin the Earth’s atmosphere, or reach escape velocity after being hit with high energy radiation from the Sun and be knocked out of Earth’s sphere of influence (mostly that one)
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