A bottle of water at 0°c is opened on the surface of the moon.what will happen?
Answers
Answer:
the water is liquid but is at zero degrees, it will instantly and vigorously boil.
Because boiling allows the most energetic molecules to escape, and in the vacuum there is nothing to stop them, the liquid water will lose energy—staying at zero degrees—until it freezes. This is because even after water is chilled to the freezing point, it must still lose the energy of fusion (79.7 calories per gram) before it becomes a solid. From this point on, what happens to the remaining water will be the same as if…
If the water is frozen, but is at zero degrees, it will begin to slowly sublimate—that is, go directly from a solid to a gas without melting. This is what happens to ice under low pressure unless it is very, very cold.
From here, the location of the water becomes important. If it’s sitting out in the sunlight, once it freezes, it’ll rapidly warm until it boils, then freeze, then boil..and so on. Essentially, it’ll rapidly boil away, and may or may not do so by going through cycles of visible boiling and cycles of calm (as I’ve seen it do in a vacuum chamber).
If it’s in the shade, is will continue to cool, though at a much reduced rate, as it radiates heat into space. If it’s located in a place the sun never shines, like the wall of a deep polar crater, it will continue to cool until it reaches a point (below about -100 degrees C) at which sublimation slowed effectively to a stop. In fact, sublimation will not stop at any temperature, but below this point, the ice will persist for billions of years, so effectively….
Incidentally, (If you’ll forgive the self promotion) I use this exact premise in my Jim Baen award winning story, Dangerous Company, when a character is forced to cross the moon without a life support pack. Instead, she has only an oxygen “pony bottle” which she must use in a manner similar to that described in “Have Spacesuit Will Travel”, purging (wasting) oxygen to expel body heat. In order to stretch the oxygen supply, she’s forced to slow her usage, with the result that she overheats, so to keep from having a heat stroke, she carried a sun shade and periodically pours liquid water over her suit, allowing it to boil and sublimate for cooling.
If you like science, you might like my