Imagine you are an astronaut exploring the vast universe in space… uh! -You were accidentally thrown out of your space-craft airlock. What happens to your body if you are not wearing a spacesuit or are exposed to the vacuum of outer space?
The first thing to remember is that many Hollywood depictions of this situation are over blown. They show that people who are not protected by helmets or spacesuits explode or freeze to death instantly. In reality, the result is the same, but not so exaggerated.
An astronaut floating in space without a suit cannot survive, but his disappearance occurs within minutes instead of seconds, resulting in a twisted exit where boiling bodily fluids & the nose and mouth are almost frozen.
Space is a vacuum without air. In other words, unlike the Earth, there is no pressure exerted by air molecules & no atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure determines the temperature at which a liquid boils & turn gaseous. When the pressure exerted by the air outside the liquid is high, such as the surface level of the Earth’s sea, its hard for bubbles of gas to form, rise to surface & escape. However, since there is almost no atmospheric pressure in space, the boiling point of liquids drops significantly.
“As you can imagine, this is a serious problem because 60% of the human body is made of water,” he said. Kris Lehnhardt, NASA’s operational space medicine physician, told. In the absence of pressure, the liquid water in our body boils and quickly changes from liquid to gas. “In essence, all body tissue, that contain water, will begin to expand,” he said.
Some people were mostly exposed to near vacuums & survived to tell the story. In 1966, NASA aeronautical engineer Jim LeBlanc helped test the performance of the prototype spacesuit in a large vacuum chamber. At some point in the test, the hose that supplies compressed air to the suit was removed. “When I stumbled backwards, I could feel saliva start bubbling on my tongue just before I lost consciousness. That’s the last thing I remember,” he said in the “Moon Machines” documentary. I said in the 2008 episode “The Space Suit”.
The formation of gas bubbles in body fluids, known as ebullism, also occurs in deep-sea scuba divers who appear too quickly when moving from a high-pressure underwater environment to a low-pressure underwater environment. For suitless astronauts, the circulatory system has its own internal pressure, so blood flowing through the veins does not boil more rapidly than water in the tissues, but large amounts of boiling occur quickly in the tissues.
A 2013 review of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, a journal that examined the previous gap between animals and humans, found that they lost consciousness within 10 seconds. Swelling of those muscles restricted blood flow to their heart and brain, as some of them later lost control of the bladder and intestinal system and their extensive muscles acted as a vapor barrier.
“Human cannot survive it. Death is likely to occur within two minutes,” Renhardt said.
According to NASA’s bioastronautics data book, the space vacuum draws air from the lungs & cause you to suffocate in minutes. After the first explosion of air is released, the vacuum continues to draw gas and water vapor from your body through the airways. The constant boiling of water also causes a cooling effect: the evaporation of water molecules absorbs the heat energy of your body and freezes most of the area near the nose & mouth. The rest of the body also cools, but it cools slowly because it doesn’t evaporate too much.
Astrophysicist Paul Satter told Forbes that temperature is a measure of the amount of energy that atoms & molecules must move, and because space is almost empty, there is little to move and it is “cold.” Become. It also means that there is no matter in space to transfer heat to. However, a person can freeze due to the evaporation of water from the body and the slow loss of heat from the radiation emitted by the body.
The lesson from all of this? Always wear spacesuits.
