Clarkesworld Podcast February 2013: Vacant Spaces (Greg Kurzawa)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Vacant Spaces (Greg Kurzawa)

The text version can be found here.

Read by Kate Baker

A deep space salvage operation goes poorly for the two humans involving.

This would be a variation on the weird stuff happens in space story (like all those surreal FTL stories). One detail that kept distracting me:

" [...] the hydrogen snow obscure his monitors."

Under what conditions can you have solid hydrogen, aside from "below 14K"? They start off in space and as far as I can tell from "Out here there’s not enough pressure to keep a body and soul together," they end up in space.


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Comments

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

"It was a snowy day in interstellar space..."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I expect the "check reaction mass tank" dashboard light was flashing.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

From what I read, solid hydrogen could condense at 2.73K if the local density is above ~10^6/cm^3.

There are some places in the universe colder than the background temperature. I think the coldest known is around 1 K. This remarkable (and temporary) condition arose from the expansion of an already cold gas cloud. Since the vapor pressure of solid H2 should scale exponentially in 1/T, hydrogen could very well be condensing into snow at that temperature (likely on dust grains.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_Nebula

Saturn V third stages produced hydrogen snow clouds when they vented excess LH2 after separation, as evaporation of the LH2 cooled the droplets until they froze.

In the far future, when the universe has cooled substantially below the current background temperature, I wonder if hydrogen ice particles will become a hazard to interstellar travel, at least sufficiently far out from galactic centers.