Why would decreasing the temperature of a gas in a syringe make the volume decrease?
In: Chemistry
The difference between a solid, liquid and gas comes down to the amount of space between the atoms. Atoms are kind of like tiny little balls, and everything is made of them. There’s a lot of different kinds of atoms, but I won’t go into that since it’s not really important for your question.
Gases have a lot of space between the atoms, and a side-effect of this is that the atoms can move around easily. Warming up a gas causes those atoms to move around a whole lot faster, and this movement causes them to push each other away even further and they spread out and increase their “volume”. Cooling a gas down has the opposite effect of slowing down the atoms so they don’t push away so much and the space between them gets smaller, reducing the total “volume”.
Cooling a gas enough can turn it into a liquid, which really just means the atoms are close enough together to be really dense, but still have enough space between them to slip and slide around easily so they “flow” around each other. Solids are just atoms that are so tight together that they can hardly move at all.
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