Inside you have the same air mixture as on Earth, but because gravity is millions of times smaller an open flame behaves significantly different. In space, of course, you can't have any fires because there isn't any oxidizer (i.e. oxygen) to sustain the combustion process.
What does fire look like in space? In the gravity on Earth, heated air rises and expands, causing flames to be teardrop shaped. In the microgravity of the air-filled International Space Station (ISS), however, flames are spheres.
The flame persists because of the diffusion of oxygen, with random oxygen molecules drifting into the fire. Absent the upward flow of hot air, fires in microgravity are dome-shaped or spherical—and sluggish, thanks to meager oxygen flow.
Our planet is the only natural environment in the known universe where fire can happen. That's because there's oxygen in the air, fuel for combustion and heat for ignition – each of which is essential for fire.
Now since the moon has no atmosphere of its own, it lacks Oxygen. Therefore, it is not possible to light fire on the moon.
This is called buoyancy and is what makes the flame shoot up and flicker. But what happens when you light a candle, say, on the International Space Station (ISS)? "In microgravity, flames burn differently—they form little spheres," says Williams.
The Sun does not "burn", like we think of logs in a fire or paper burning. The Sun glows because it is a very big ball of gas, and a process called nuclear fusion is taking place in its core.
The Darvaza gas crater fire, near Derweze, Turkmenistan, is a large hole leaking natural gas that has been burning since 1971. An eternal flame near Kirkuk, Iraq, known to the locals as Baba Gurgur, is said to have been burning for thousands of years.
The oldest unequivocal evidence, found at Israel's Qesem Cave, dates back 300,000 to 400,000 years, associating the earliest control of fire with Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
No, you cannot hear any sounds in near-empty regions of space. Sound travels through the vibration of atoms and molecules in a medium (such as air or water). In space, where there is no air, sound has no way to travel.
Smoking is not allowed on the ISS for several reasons: Smoking is a fire hazard and since the station is an oxygen-rich environment, it would be very easy for a fire to get out of control. Even without the risk of fire, the ISS is too small a place to permit astronauts to smoke freely.
So space is pretty empty, which limits the destruction you can do with an explosive in space. Because when you detonate TNT, it's not the shrapnel-- that is, the fast moving stuff that flies away from the bomb-- or the hot gas from the weapon itself that does the most destruction. It's the shock wave.
A former Space Station astronaut explained that it's not at all like burping on Earth – and it's all to do with gravity. Former Commander Chris Hadfield said, 'You can't burp in space because the air, food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles.
Flames are blue at the base where they are hottest, and yellow above because as the hot air rises it takes some of the unburned wax with it in the form of smoke and soot. Flames on Earth are cone shaped and blue at the base and yellow at the top because heated air rises. Marianne Dyson photo, 2021.
The Universe is thought to consist of three types of substance: normal matter, 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. Normal matter consists of the atoms that make up stars, planets, human beings and every other visible object in the Universe.
The Behram Fire at the Yazd Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Iran is thought to be the oldest human-made eternal flame, at more than 1,500 years old. It has been burning since 470 AD and can only be witnessed by practicing zoroastrians, who've tended to it over countless generations.
In eastern Australia, these three components have been going strong since prehistoric times, leading to the longest-lasting known fire in the world: a scorcher that has burned beneath Mount Wingen in New South Wales for at least 5,500 years — although some geologists suspect it could be up to 500,000 years old.
On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia.
Without oxygen, fires won't burn. Water vapor in the air, or high relative humidity values, help to keep fuel sources moist. This helps slow the spread of fires and hinders ignition of fires. When conditions are windy, the oxygen supply near a fire keeps getting replenished.
Eventually, the fuel of the sun - hydrogen - will run out. When this happens, the sun will begin to die. But don't worry, this should not happen for about 5 billion years. After the hydrogen runs out, there will be a period of 2-3 billion years whereby the sun will go through the phases of star death.
The sun, like the rest of the universe, is made mostly of hydrogen. There isn't enough oxygen in the entire solar system to keep the surface of the sun burning through chemical combustion for more than a very short time—probably hours. Instead, the sun's heat and light comes from thermonuclear fusion.
In zero gravity, where heat does not rise, candle flames take on a uniform oval shape instead of the teardrop one seen on Earth. In space, because there is no up and down, the flame shapes look similar even when inverted. Upright, the flame is primarily next to and above the wick, where the fuel comes in.
A match in the vacuum of space itself would have no flame, as there is no oxygen there to burn.
While we can't smell anything in outer space because, as we mentioned, anyone attempting to do so would almost instantly die, what we can smell are the things that have come back from space. Space suits, for instance, smell differently after they've returned from space than they did before blast-off.