![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Sunset-over-the-Pacific-Ocean-California-USA_web.jpg\" "\\"Sunset-over-the-Pacific-Ocean--California--USA_web\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nBut water only has a very small window in which it can be a liquid. For instance, if you took some warm water up to a very high elevation, it would start to boil, and become a gas! The higher up you took it, the lower and lower your boiling point would be.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Why? Because higher altitudes on Earth mean lower pressure. If there\u2019s not enough force pressing the water into a liquid phase, then there\u2019s no force binding the water molecules together. If you simply allow them to diffuse away, they will. And that\u2019s the definition of a gas, which is what you\u2019ll wind up with.<\/p>\n On the other hand, water has no business being a liquid at low temperatures, either. You can see \u2014 from this diagram below \u2014 that if you start with liquid water, you can turn it into a gas by lowering the pressure, but you can also turn it into a solid by lowering the temperature.<\/p>\n \u00a0 So my question is this:<\/p>\n If you took a glass of water into outer space, would the water freeze or would the water boil?<\/em><\/p>\n This is a question that seems awfully tough, because in addition to knowing about water:<\/p>\n We also need to know about outer space. Space is a lot of things: cold, dark, and empty come to mind right away. And they come to mind, pretty much, as soon as you leave the Earth.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Well, the temperature of space is, at its coldest, just the temperature of the leftover glow from the Big Bang. This radiation, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, bathes the entire Universe in a temperature of only 2.7 Kelvin. That\u2019s less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, or -455 degrees Fahrenheit! But there\u2019s also \u2014 literally \u2014 no pressure in space. So, what happens? Who wins? Does the water freeze or boil?<\/p>\n Oddly enough, the answer is first one<\/strong>, and then the other<\/strong>! It turns out that having a pressure vacuum will cause the water to boil almost instantly. In other words, the effect of boiling is much, much faster than the effect of freezing.<\/p>\n But the story doesn\u2019t end there. Once the water has boiled, we now have some isolated water molecules in a gaseous state, but a very, very cold environment! These tiny water vapor droplets now immediately freeze (or, technically, desublimate), and become ice crystals.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n