Yes, you can shoot a bullet in space because modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, allowing it to ignite without atmospheric oxygen, but it would be silent, push the shooter backward due to recoil (Newton's Third Law), and the bullet would travel in a straight line indefinitely without air resistance or gravity slowing it down. The smoke would form a sphere, and while it might eventually slow from interactions with diffuse interstellar matter, it could travel for millions of years or until it hits something.
Assuming you are floating freely in space the gun will work just as it does on Earth. However, the bullet will continue moving for many thousands of years, eventually coming to a stop due to the friction from the diffuse material found in 'empty' space (or when it encounters another object).
What will happen, however, is that the bullet will travel farther as there is no air to create drag on the bullet. There is still gravity on the moon, just less than there is here. That means that while a bullet would likely travel much further before the gravity causes it to fall, it would still inevitably fall.
If you shot your bullet into space in a random direction (i.e. you aren't deliberately aiming at the Sun, for example), then it will almost certainly continue to move forever without ever encountering another object, slowing down, or altering trajectory.
There is initially a large explosive force which accelerates the bullet up to a very high speed very quickly. The bullet is then left to gradually decelerate due to the pull of gravity and friction with the air, until it stops. Then, gravity acts as an accelerating force but friction still acts as a decelerating force.
If fired vertically into the air, a bullet can reach a height of up to around 2 miles. But because of the various forces acting on a projectile that is fired in this way, the shooter is extremely unlikely to be hit by one of his own bullets as it comes back down.
The magnitude of this scale factor (nearly 300,000 kilometres or 190,000 miles in space being equivalent to one second in time), along with the fact that spacetime is a manifold, implies that at ordinary, non-relativistic speeds and at ordinary, human-scale distances, there is little that humans might observe that is ...
The recoil from shooting a gun in zero gravity would push the shooter backward, demonstrating Newton's third law of every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Bullets fired in space could travel indefinitely at a constant speed unless they hit an object, due to the lack of atmospheric drag and gravity.
Unfortunately, the answer is "not very long at all." Within just 10 to 15 seconds, a person in space without a spacesuit would fall unconscious due to a lack of oxygen. Even if they held their breath, their lungs would expand and rupture before their blood and other bodily fluids began to boil, causing massive damage.
The founder of astrogeology, Gene Shoemaker, is the only person to date whose ashes have been buried on the moon.
A powder horn would be used to pour the powder into the barrel of a gun before the bullet or shot were added. Wet powder won't ignite but dry powder still has its own oxidant. A flintlock pistol would probably malfunction on Mars because of the dust and cold; they were touchy weapons when they were common on Earth.
Because there is nothing out in space (like an atmosphere), the sound waves from one astronaut's whistling can't travel over to the other astronaut's ears.
A 5-gallon-bucket seemed to be about the right size in terms of portability and something I would have a good chance of hitting most of the time. For my first attempt, I tried filling the bucket full of sand. This made a fine bullet catcher - it stopped all of the bullets before they hit the bottom of the bucket.
You shot a massive rail gun towards the earth from the moon, the projectile would move fast enough to escape the moon's gravity and it would keep speeding through space until it reached earth's atmosphere but at that speed, the metal would start to melt and the bullet would be torn apart before it hit the ground.
In 1975, the Soviet Union did something that had never been done in space before. They fired a gun from a space station, the only time such a thing has happened. It was an event that was only uncovered after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s.
Once supercharged, the Gravity Gun emits blue light rather than orange, quakes in Gordon's hands, and creates small bolts of energy across its muzzle. Its powers are vastly enhanced, enabling it to manipulate objects of far greater mass than it normally could as well as pull and repel them with greater force.
Shooting stars? Yes. Bullets carry their own oxidising agent in the explosive of the cartridge (which is sealed, anyway) so there's no need for atmospheric oxygen to ignite the propellant.
But eventually, the lack of oxygen will take its toll. One by one, your major organs will shut down. After only a handful of minutes you will suffer complete organ failure, otherwise known in the medical community as death.
It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years.
Because astronauts like the ones on the International Space Station (ISS) are moving so quickly, they're also aging a bit more slowly than the rest of us. Due to a principle of physics known as time dilation, after a six-month stint on the ISS, returning astronauts are just a tiny bit younger than the rest of us.
THE AUTHOR POINTS OUT THAT VELOCITY IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN A BULLET'S ENERGY AND WOUNDING EFFECT, AND THAT SUPERSONIC BULLETS ARE THOSE WHICH TRAVEL AT A VELOCITY GREATER THAN THE SPEED OF SOUND, OR MORE THAN APPROXIMATELY 1100 FEET PER SECOND.
We can see that the deflection distance varies roughly linearly with wind speed at all distances, so we can project that up to a wind speed big enough to make the bullet miss you: about 100 miles per hour (a powerful gust in a hurricane) across the whole distance between you and the shooter should move the bullet about ...