What colour is air in space?

Question

If you were to put air in a clear glass capsule, then launch it into deep space. What colour would the air be?

I appreciate air contains contaminants which could give air the blue colouration, so how about oxygen?

Answer 1

purple but if u look at it carefully from a 45 degree angle the air makes a sentance which says : who the **** cares?  

Answer 2

Well, a small container of air would appear pretty much clear to our eyes, simply because it takes so vastly much air to cause a noticeable change to the visible light passing through it. However, if you put terrestrial air in a container in space, then assuming it was warm enough to remain in a gaseous state, it would be blue just like the air here on Earth. There is nothing fundamentally different about the refractive and light-scattering properties of air on Earth and air in a container out in space, nor is there anything fundamentally different about the light that would be passing through them, so the color would remain the same.

Answer 3

Air is a mixture of various gases in our atmosphere. Air in a glass capsule in space will be  the same as it is in here. It will not change color because it can only change color if it undergoes a chemical change.  

Answer 4

Good question. I often wonder what colour grass is in space too.

Answer 5

Pure oxygen actually has a slightly bluish colour, so if it was just pure oxygen in your glass container, it would appear bluish in space.

But ordinary Earth air is basically colourless, so your glass capsule would not have any colour to the contents.

Answer 6

Large amounts of air would still look blue. It's the air molecules themselves that scatter blue part of the spectrum, not the contaminants as such.

If you think of it, our atmosphere IS air trapped in space, it's trapped by the gravity of our planet earth.

Answer 7

*laughing*

There is no air in space!

Answer 8

there is no air in space

Answer 9

space is a vaccum,an a vaccum is an empty space wher there is no air.That is why astrounaunts take oxygen with them.Air does not have colour u only feel it.The dark lights u see in space are light waves an galaxies.Air is oxygen but it contains nitrrogen,carbondioxide which have no colour.

Answer 10

"AIR" has no colour, either within an atmosphere or in space.

Answer 11

I guess you mean looking back at the atmosphere from space.  Air is colorless.  The sky is blue due to scattering of sunlight in the upper atmosphere.  You have seen shots of Earth from orbit, surely.  There will be plenty on te NASA site.  The atmosphere does indeed look blue, for the same reason the sky looks blue from down here.

Answer 12

Liquid Nitrogen is colorless, which is most of what air is at the temperatures of space.

Liquid Oxygen is pale blue so I would say air in a glass capsule would be a pale pale blue liquid

Answer 13

If you have a high enough concentration of the gas in a vial and put it into space it could cool down enough to turn liquid.  Oxygen is blue when it is a liquid.  It's really quite amazing.

Also, if the gas was moving quite fast towards you, the IR emissions of the gas would be doppler shifted and you'd see it.

For example, a main spectroscopic feature of CO (carbon monoxide) is at wavenumber 2139 cm−1 (4675nm).  It emits this IR radiation because of thermal vibrations of the molecules.  The gas in space could be heated up by illumination from starlight (slightly above absolute zero is enough to get a small amout of emission).

Due to the doppler shift, if the gas is moving at you at terrific speeds (say 0.86 the speed of light - for whatever reason), you would see it as an orange color (even faster and it would be yellow or even blue).  Most light is red shifted because most objects are moving away from each other though and you can only see the emissions in the IR.

Thumbs down to Katie for calling you a jackass.

Also here's a link about gas in space (learn more about the Spitzer Space Telescope)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitze...

Answer 14

lime green.

Answer 15

air has no colour jackass.