Current Events > If you set off a nuke in deep space...

(+) Yeah! (+)

How long would the effects linger?

Only one way to know for sure.

Watch Independence Day.

Ask the US military

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

LeoRavus posted...

Watch Independence Day.

I have seen said documentary but they didn't go into detail.

Too much autobiography stuff about Randy Quaid.

ai123 posted...

Ask the US military

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

I mean full on deep space, no nearby planets.

It keeps happening in sci-fi so I was curious.

Supernovae are like gigantic nuclear explosions, and they are going off all the time

There would be no explosion, the space is a vacuum so an implosion would occur. Given the magnitude of the plutonium hydrogen atoms exceeding jules beyond space-time non mass capacity it would create a tiny sized black hole for a fraction of a second.

It might turn the sun off.

trappedunderice posted...

There would be no explosion, the space is a vacuum so an implosion would occur. Given the magnitude of the plutonium hydrogen atoms exceeding jules beyond space-time non mass capacity it would create a tiny sized black hole for a fraction of a second.

no that's not true. a vacuum doesn't mean anything for explosions--there's just less pressure on the explosion so it will be bigger.

There would be no mushroom cloud, just a giant fireball and then nothing. The explosion would be a perfect sphere, or pretty close.

a nuclear bomb doesn't need oxygen outside of the small internal components, so as long as the bomb casing was air-tight it would be fine.

the "effects" wouldn't linger unless something was in the vicinity to get hit, they would radiate away at the speed of light.

so a nearby asteroid or ship could become irradiated, same as chernobyl, but the "space itself" wouldn't have some kind of nuclear "cloud" that lingered.

Robot2600 posted...

the "effects" wouldn't linger unless something was in the vicinity to get hit, they would radiate away at the speed of light.

so a nearby asteroid or ship could become irradiated, same as chernobyl, but the "space itself" wouldn't have some kind of nuclear "cloud" that lingered.

That's essentially what I was asking.

I figured the radiation would disperse pretty quickly, since irradiating a thirty-mile square cube of space is like irradiating a single atom and expecting it to change a solar system.

yea i see no reason it doesn't travel at the speed of light.

so the radiation would expand out in a sphere and you'd get hit with a single blast wave of radiation. seems like you could fly through the blast zone as soon as the fire went away.

if, somehow, doubtfully, there was still radiocative "dust" it would be flung away at a bazillion miles an hour. the surface area of the expanding sphere increases geometrically compared to rate at which it moves so something like 10 kilometers away from the big fireball should be more than enough to avoid a blast of radiation from an earth-nuke.

also there wouldn't be a "crush" at all after the explosion either, since there was no expanding air for the vacuum to crunch back, just a big flash and then it would get bigger and then fade away.

cosmic radiation is no joke and would dwarf anything we could detonate. the Sun is kicking out high energy particles constantly.