Bubbles Within Bubbles: An Astronaut's Experience

Astronaut Don Petit of the International Space Station seems to be having a great time with the lack of gravity. As there is no force pushing things around, he decided to play with water bubbles and managed to put one inside the other.

Petit's experience is proven through the video above. In it we can see large bubbles inside other bubbles, which remain long without bursting. The astronaut takes the opportunity to insert several bubbles into other bubbles to see the result.

The great question of the experiment is: Why do the air bubbles inside the water bubble keep spinning around the center? According to io9, to understand the answer we need to understand that we are not just seeing a drop, but a centrifuge.

The surface tension of the droplet does not have to deal with gravitational force, which holds the air droplets together, spinning as if they were in a centrifuge.

The reason we have centrifuges in laboratories is to separate the materials. The denser material remains outside the centrifuge while the lighter material is pushed to the center. As we know, water is denser than air. And that's what happens in this experiment: the bubbles are pushed to the center of the drop.

* Posted on 23/04/2012

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