Can you freeze in outer space?

Very often in science fiction, you can see how an astronaut takes off his spacesuit helmet and instantly freezes, turning into a block of ice, however, this is nothing more than a myth.

In fact, in the vacuum of space, heat transfer will occur extremely slowly, exclusively due to radiation. If a person is thrown into open space far from a star, for example, near Jupiter, then the water on the skin and in its upper layers will almost instantly boil and evaporate, covering the skin with a thin crust of ice, which will lead to frostbite of the entire surface of the body, but will not have critical consequences in the form of death or loss of limbs.

A person will freeze to death only after a few hours, for comparison, in the waters of the Arctic Ocean, one can freeze to death in less than 10 minutes, and an average person turns into a block of ice after about 10 hours, being in outer space.

Once in outer space, a person will die in 2 minutes from oxygen starvation of the brain, so freezing to death is not something that will bother him in such a situation. It will be even more difficult to freeze in a spacesuit due to its good thermal insulation properties; in fact, a person will run out of air reserves much earlier than he begins to feel cold.

For people on the ISS, the problem of heat turns into a completely different side, due to the large surface area of ​​the station, it receives a lot of heat from the Sun so that people do not bake inside it, huge radiators are attached to the station to increase heat transfer. A person who finds himself in open space next to a star will face a similar problem, the radiation of the star will fry him before he could in principle freeze.

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