Random Science question (space!)

[Vault101]

ok...so in space we have thease massive (really massive) clouds of gas/dust called Nebulas

and thease things are incomprehensibly huge

my question is would it ever be possible where you get one and the "gas" is breathable?....like you could fly your spaceship into the middle and stick your head out and breathe?

I know theres probably many other factors (the vacum, temperatruee, dus, types of gasses)

but yeah...

 

[SomeLameStuff]

Well, Nebulas mostly consist of Hydrogen and Helium, so without oxygen, you'd asphyxiate pretty quick, if you're not instantly flash-frozen or scorched to well done.

If you somehow find a Nebula that has oxygen though... maybe, however unlikely that is.

 

[BeeGeenie]

The real question, then, is 'could high concentrations of oxygen atoms exist in a nebula?'

 

[Korolev]

I sincerely doubt it. And as you pointed out, the temperature would make it extremely unpleasant. In fact, you'd almost certainly die immediately. It would be more lethal than the vacuum.

In ordinary (mostly empty) space, you can survive without a suit for a couple of minutes - the cold isn't that much of an issue because it's mostly a vacuum - there is little to transfer heat away from your body. You wouldn't freeze to death immediately in a vacuum - it'd take many hours for all the heat to radiate away from your body.

But if you're in a nebula, the minute you stick your head out, the super-cooled gases would rip the heat away from your head in an instant, killing you as surely as if you'd just dunked your head into a vat full of liquid nitrogen.

It would be a relatively painless way to go - you'd freeze so quickly you wouldn't feel any pain (or not much at any rate). People who have accidentally frozen their body parts with Liquid Nitrogen have reportedly said that it wasn't painful until the body part began to warm up again - at which point they felt tremendous pain. But if you freeze your head, you won't be alive when your body begins to heat up.

 

[RicoGrey]

Here is something I found to be completely WTF and MIND EXPLODING. Human beings can survive the vacuum of space. For a short period of time anyway. Enough time to stick your head out the window at least. Seriously, go to NASA's website and explore a bit, it happened to one astronaut for somewhere like 30 seconds.

Supposedly the reason we don't freeze right away, is because even though there is no heat in space, there also is nothing to absorb our heat. So heat dissipates through radiation which is apparently not a super quick process. It also turns out that our skin is really good at holding our internal organs, well, holding them in, so we don't explode from decompression(other problems can occur though).

I would imagine the real problem here though, being the fact that even though it is a cloud, it is a cloud where the individual parts are still pretty far from each other. I am basing that on our local asteroid belts. Even though the asteroid belts are "dense" in a cosmic sense, each asteroid is on average thousands of miles away from each other. Based on that, I would imagine there would not really be any "pockets" of air to breath.

Of course temperature would play an issue if there WERE pockets of air to breath, cause assuming that it wasn't being warmed to just the right temperature somehow, it would probably be slightly above absolute zero.

EDIT: I should note that I am also drunk, but I swear the NASA thing is true.

 

[Da Orky Man]

The concentration of gas ina a nebula is somewhat less than what is considered a hard vacuum her on Earth. There wouldn't be any noticeable difference between breathing vacuum or a nebula.

snip

I thought that was common knowledge?

 

[Vault101]

I thought that was common knowledge?

for some reason pop culture leads up to belive we explode...or freeze...or somthing

 

[killcannon71]

here are some helpful websites, google is your friend.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/08/02/astronomers-finally-detect-oxygen-molecules-in-space/

Protip: we do not breathe oxygen atoms, we breathe molecules (o2)

 

[Denamic]

You'd need gravity to condense the gas enough to be considered an atmosphere.
And if there were such a source of gravity inside the nebula, the gas would start piling up more and more, gradually increasing the gravitational pull, eventually forming a star.
So no, it's not possible. Besides, they're not made out of oxygen in the first place.
There's also the total lack of heat, and the radiation, etc.
Space hates life.