Can water freeze and boil at the same time?

Question

(in space or a vacuum I heard)

Answer 1

Yes, it can! I have seen it happening. At the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, they had a Plexiglas cylinder which the visitors could pump water, at room temperature, into. Nothing exceptional there. Then, you could switch on a vacuum pump that drastically lowered the pressure, and the room-temperature water began to boil after a few seconds. That in turn cooled down the water until it reached the "triple point", and got so cold that it began to freeze WHILE IT WAS STILL BOILING. It was very cool to watch (literally, and figuratively)!

Answer 2

In a way, yes. Many substances, including water, have a physical state called the "triple point." This is a set of conditions where the phases of solid, liquid, and vapor can all exist in equilibrium, and tiny changes will cause the substance to transition from one state to another. For water, this would mean at the triple point that a tiny increase in pressure would cause it to turn into a solid (or freeze) and a tiny increase in temperature would cause it to boil. The triple point for water is at about 0 degrees Celcius (32 F) and at very low pressure... 0.006 atmospheres. This low pressure would be a vacuum, as you had correctly heard.

Answer 3

Yes its called the trinity of the state of water .There is a point that at a certain temperature an entity can exist in all three phases at the same time.