What Does Space Feel Like? What Does It Smell Like?
Being in space would feel very different from being on Earth. It would be cold, dark and empty.
When we say “being in space’ we mean being out away from the Earth or any other planets. If you took off in a rocket ship from Earth and then landed on the Moon or Mars it would not be “out in space” and everything would actually be pretty similar. You might not be able to breathe, and it might be a very different temperature, but you’d still feel gravity and be able to walk around. If you were near the Sun, you would probably just be vaporized.
But most of the Universe is not near a planet or a star. Instead, it is cold, dark and empty space. Let’s dive in.
Is there air in space? Can you breath?
You could not breathe in space. We can breathe on Earth because the Earth has an atmosphere, basically some gas that is stuck to the Earth because of gravity. Other planets have atmospheres as well, like Mars and Venus, but they are very different from Earth’s and we would not be able to breathe them.
However, the further away you get from the planet, the thinner the atmosphere gets. This even happens on Earth, it’s why when people climb very tall mountains they can often get lightheaded – there is not as much air up there, so it’s harder to breathe.
Once you get about 8 kilometers away from the surface of the Earth, you would be completely unable to breathe, because the air is too thin. This means that when planes fly above this height (which most commercial passenger flights do) they need to pump oxygen around to make sure passengers can breathe.
Now we probably wouldn’t call about 8 kilometers “space”. You are still very close to Earth and being pulled by its gravity. Instead, generally, people start space at about 100 kilometers when planes don’t work anymore and you need spacecraft.
Also – just because you can’t breathe, doesn’t mean you could hold your breath and survive in space. Because the atmosphere is so low, space would actually suck the air out of you, out of your ears and mouth and nose. Even if you could hold your breath for a few minutes on Earth, in space, without a spacesuit, to protect you from this you’d be dead in 30 seconds. Space would take away all the air from your body, and you’d suffocate almost immediately.
Is it hot or cold in space?
Space is very cold, but not the coldest thing in the Universe.
There is no limit to how hot something can get. Temperature and heat are just types of energy. You can always pump a bit more energy into something and make it a bit hotter. However, there is a hard limit to how cold something can get. There is only so much energy you can remove from something.
The coldest something can get is -273 degrees celsius (also known as 0 “Kelvin”, the temperature scale physicists use).
Space is about 3 degrees above that, so -270 degrees celsius. So without a spacesuit, almost all living things would instantly freeze to death.
This means, believe it or not, the coldest places in our Universe are actually on Earth. Scientists have several labs where we have cooled things down using lazers to significantly below the temperature of space (almost as cold as something can get). Our Earth, its a pretty special place.
Is there gravity in space?
There is lots of gravity from lots of different things in space. If you are close to the Earth, the Earth’s gravity will pull you in. Same for the Sun and any other planet.
How strong the gravity is, will depend on how big the object that’s pulling you. So you need to get very far away from the Sun to be free of it. However not as far away from the Earth.
To get completely away from the Earth’s gravity and really feel like you are floating, you need to get more than 10,000 kilometers away. However a lot of spaceships and satellites never get that far away, but still, experience zero gravity (like the International Space Station above). This occurs because they ‘fall’ towards the Earth canceling out its gravity, not because they are so far away that it doesn’t affect them. To be completely free of the Earth’s gravity, you would need to be much further away than the Moon, which is being pulled by the Earth. To get away from our Sun’s gravity, you would need to go completely out of our Solar System, at which point you might get caught up in another star’s gravity.
What does space smell like?
Space has a wide variety of smells. A lot of space is basically made of gas. It’s quite easy to work out what gas in deep space would smell like – you point a telescope at it and work out what it’s made of, and compare it to what the thing smells like on Earth.
Different nebula (clouds of gas) in space have all sorts of different smells. There is an entire area of science devoted to recreating their smells and seeing what they’d be like. Scents of the different nebula have been identified as roses, brandy, gasoline and gunpowder.
However, our personal favorite here at the Universal Story is the smell at the center of our galaxy. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute recently pointed a large radio telescope at the cloud of dust at the center of our galaxy to try and understand what it was made of, in particular, looking for what compounds may have formed the building blocks of life on the early Earth. They found a compound called ethyl formate, a main component of raspberries. Now raspberries are filled with a large number of other chemicals, so it probably doesn’t smell exactly like them. But it is beautiful to think, that at the very center of our galaxy, in the cold night, there is, a faint whiff of raspberries.
Our Universe is a weird and wonderful place.
