If an object is dumped into space would it explode, implode, or would nothing happen?

Depends on the object. If it’s solid, nothing happens. If it’s a blob of fluid, depends how close it is to a gravitational field.

If it’s an open container filled with a fluid under pressure, like a human body, the fluid would be sucked out of the container.

Another property of space is that it doesn’t conduct heat. Your body, for example, conducts heat into the air around you. In space, all your body’s heat would stay trapped within your body. So you’d boil alive. I think. I never bothered to double-check if this was true.

Nothing is likely to happen. There is a lot of space junk floating out there.

@Qingu You wouldn’t boil alive. You would radiate heat away, and while you would lose heat at a much slower rate than you would in the atmosphere, your rate of heat loss would be steady until you reached the local temperature—close to 3 or 4 Kelvin, I believe. Not sure how long it would take to get there, though. Some of your heat loss would be compensated for by heat being radiated by the sun.

I think the issue is that it only radiates a very tiny amount.

Like Qingu said, much depends on structure, pressure, integrity… We put objects in space all the time. The designers of the satellites and space suits and exploration devices have to take into account the conditions of space, which have been quite predictable. Space is a vacuume, and damn cold. (the human body would radiate heat out and it would not take anything long to freeze.)

I found a good excerpt: If you have no molecules at all, the concept of temperature is meaningless. That’s why it’s technically incorrect to speak of the “cold of outer space” — strictly speaking, space has no temperature. (On the other hand, space will make objects that are floating around in it cold — in some cases, very cold. Space is what’s known as a “temperature sink,” meaning it sucks heat out of things.

Here is a good article about one of my favorite things in space; The Hubble Telescope. It mentions about it’s structure and how the scientist had to think about insulation and power supply complete with batteries that are solar charged. You should get a feel for what it takes to build something that can withstand the conditions.

http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Telescopes/Hubble.html#b

Does space suck heat out of things?

It sucks things out of things, like fluids out of containers, air out of spacecraft compartments, etc. But my point above was that it doesn’t actually conduct heat—precisely because there are no molecules in space for the mechanical vibrations of hot things to go into.

On earth, stuff cools off because the air around it is made of molecules and those molecules suck heat away from the hot thing by conduction. But in space the only way to cool off is through radiation—that is, converting your heat energy into light energy (photons) and sending those photons away through space. But it’s actually rather hard to radiate!

Second law, entropy always increases.

I quoted that ‘sucking’ thing from another site. ‘Sucking’ is the wrong word, but heat exchange does occur. Space is a heat-sink.

I think space is the opposite of a heat sink. Consider a Thermos. The reason the heat stays in the thermos is because it’s surrounded by vacuum.

The “sucking” is not a heat exchange, it is the result of vacuum’s effects on fluids under pressure.

@Qingu as I said, ‘sucking’ was the wrong word, you took it too literally. I am assuming the poster is a bit young and hasn’t read that much physics yet. and I found that post on another website aimed at a younger, less read audience.

But if you really want to discuss this:

Stefan-Boltzman Law still works here. It absolutely depends on if the object is in direct light of our sun, or in the shade of a planet or far from any star at all, but Stefan-Boltzman while taking into account the energy density will answer the question of heat exchanges in space.

It is fair to say that things freeze in space.

A nice source I found on the subject:

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_ht.html

@Qingu…. That was a good nasa link. That should help the poster.

They only freeze if they radiate their heat energy away, though.

I guess my point is that radiation—the only way things get cold in space—is an internal process, rather than a property of space. Maybe this is nonsensical nitpicking though.

Objects in space do radiate their heat away. It is not a matter of being a property of space, it is a property of energy.

Yah but they radiate their heat away anywhere. So putting them in space doesn’t make them radiate it more.

It’s just that there isn’t any other stuff (air, water, solid shells) to keep in that radiation (or to keep in radiation from stars nearby to produce an ambient temperature).

I never said it exchanged heat ‘more’. The end ambient equilibrium will be considerably colder though. ;o)

UNLESS… it was close to a star!

Or under the gravitational pull and sinking into a super gas giant!

Most solid objects, if you suddenly removed atmospheric pressure, would not explode. This includes human bodies, despite what is depicted in movies like Outland (1981). There is surely no reason that anything would implode, either. Most solid objects would simply lose whatever internal air they contain by leakage.

As for temperature effects:

Most animals would quickly freeze due to radiative heat loss, as noted above. Of the four physical mechanisms by which the human body loses heat (radiative, conductive, convective, and evaporative), radiative heat loss predominates even at room temperature. If you’ve ever seen infrared night-vision images of people outdoors, they glow brightly against their surroundings—that’s heat leaving the body.

The thermos bottle analogy fails because its vacuum-containing walls are coated with a silvery lining that reflects infrared back into the liquid, unlike the exposure of a body directly to the cold of space.

Because radiative heat transfer is proportional to the difference in 4th powers of the body and its surroundings (i.e., T1^4 – T2^4), the rate of heat loss is thus way higher in the extreme cold of space where T1 = body temp = 37 degC = 310 degK, whereas T2 = 2.7 degK rather than the usual 295 or so degK at room temperature, so T1^4 – T2^4 is enormously greater in space. There was a similar discussion thread on this a few weeks ago, I think.

Wow, I did not know that radiation was that big of a deal. I retract all my statements!

Thank you, @gasman for explaining. I didn’t want to start writing formulas and @Qingu didn’t want to look up Stefan-Boltzman.

@cazzie Thanks. You could considerably slow down heat loss by wrapping yourself in one of those reflective “space blankets” with the silvery side facing inward, but then without a pressure suit that’s the least of your problems if you fall out of your spacecraft!

@gasman, I have no plans for falling out of any spaceships anytime soon. I might consider loading up and joining the crew of the Serenity, with their artificial gravity and Kaylee, who keeps it running. (not to mention Capt. Mal… yummy)

@cazzie, I looked it up… just didn’t understand it :) I’m kind of a dummy when it comes to equations. Kind of puts a hard limit on what I’m able to intelligently discuss about physics