fire in space...?

Question

i know that since theres no oxygen in space, you cant have a fire, but just follow along. You know how here on earth fire always goes upwards? Say you lit something on fire in such deep space that there's NO gravity. Which way would the fire go? could you turn the burning object upside down and have the fire follow it?

Answer 1

inside a space vessel, there is oxygen in the air for nauts to breath. so a fire can burn.

it burns in a sphere. equal in all directions

like this

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT1999/images/6711sunderland.jpg

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/shared/news2000/flames/candles-large.jpg
the candle interferes with the formation of the sphere
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT1999/images/6711friedman.jpg

this image can help you under stand how a flame works
http://www.mre.aist.go.jp/db-uwt1/DUWTI/Docs/uw/5_fig/fig_5_50_1.gif
in zero G, the vectors become distributed from all angles. there is no UP, up becomes equally present on all sides.


wow this is crazy. esp the part with a bubble with water drops bouncing around inside a sphere of water.
http://tubearoo.com/articles/90710/Zero_Gravity_Water_Experiments.html


there seems to be some talk of a nasa fire experiment in 0 g with flames burning on a flat surface as it spins around. not a lot is said though and no pictures have been released.
still follows the same principle.

Answer 2

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There was a fire on the MIR space station. A fire requires a fuel and an oxidant, it doesn't necessarily have to be air or oxygen, it just often is air on Earth but various chemicals can oxidize various other chemicals, that's why rockets work in space, they carry an oxidizer with them. Fire can be a serious problem on a spaceship. In zero-G, a fire can't remove it's smoke and bring in fresh air by thermal convection like it does on Earth but with the ventilation systems on spacecrafts, they don't need to. The sun isn't a chemical fire, it's nuclear fusion and you don't need oxygen for that. Besides the Sun is like a giant planet, many many times larger than Earth, whatever Earth has, the Sun has billions of times more, indeed you can imagine Earth as a tiny piece that broke off and cooled a long time ago.

Answer 3

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RE:
fire in space...?
i know that since theres no oxygen in space, you cant have a fire, but just follow along. You know how here on earth fire always goes upwards? Say you lit something on fire in such deep space that there's NO gravity. Which way would the fire go? could you turn the burning object upside down and...

Answer 4

Things like match heads and gunpowder contain their own oxygen in solid form, so they would burn in a vacuum. As soon as the match head burned away however, the fire would go out because there is no oxygen in space. A lighter would not work at all. The sun contains trace amounts of oxygen but it doesn't burn because the temperature is too high for molecules to combine. The sun's source of energy comes from nuclear fusion, not fire.

Answer 5

First, let's think of a regular candle. They burn up. This is because the flame's reaction with oxygen. It consumes oxygen, which produces other gases in the process. They are hotter than other gases around them, so they rise, which causes the flame to rise along with the rising gases.

In case there is no gravity, the expansion of the produced gases does not cause them to go anywhere. They just stay there and expand spherically around the source. The flame does not point anywhere, and burns like a sphere (given the reaction point is small, like a match). Second, since the auto-oxygen-feeder mechanism also fails, the flame burns in rather dull colors, and will extinguish itself rather quickly if there is no flow of air (or if the match is not moved around) to feed oxygen into the reaction.

Answer 6

Look you can't observe and explai it. This is same situation as with glass of water. If you try to put out water from glass you'll do nothing. You have to use your fingers and grab this water from glass into the space around. When you do that water will stay on same place and in same form as in the moment when you are pull out she from glass. But this is water, material thing. For flame you can't suppose anything because he is let's say "gas fluid" and you can't move em i.e. with hand. Veradisca & Best Regards, Neven.

Answer 7

If there was no fire in space the Sun would be a dark hard thing, it is burning, it is in space.
Without any gravity the atoms would just fly apart, ever expanding. The atoms would be released and just keep going, no gravity to slow them down or hold them back or to follow as you turned the object they were escaping from. They would shoot out and just keep going in whatever direction the hole was at the moment they escaped.

Answer 8

there is no up and down in space...because its SPACE...there is no ground......BUT if you some how do that then the fire would make its own gravity and become round...

Answer 9

If you lit a match inside the space station, the flame would be a fuzzy ball surrounding the match head.

Answer 10

The fire would burn in a sphere. I think there have been experiments in the space shuttle.