Knowledge

Can pure oxygen be a solid?

If you get it cold enough, yes.

Under normal pressure, oxygen freezes at -218.4 C and boils at -183 C.

If you’re insane enough or suicidal enough to isolate pure oxygen and then freeze it. Because you are a danger warrior, and liquid oxygen, the closest thing to purified, concentrated essence of malevolence you’re ever likely to see, is not dangerous enough for you, oh no.

You get ‘em, Tiger. You’re the sort who snorts fluorine to clear your sinuses and uses liquid oxygen to clean grease stains out of your clothes (at which task it excels, by the way), and you want to live the high life. You want to take it up a notch.

So you chill some liquid oxygen to around 54k and yup…it will in fact freeze.

And now you have a solid chunk of extremely concentrated, highly dense, ravenously electronegative hate that is doing absolutely everything in its power to kill you all the time.

You’d be amazed what will become flammable around solid oxygen that you don’t normally think of as flammable, and what a gentle nudge it takes to get it over that activation energy hump.

Related Posts

Why is it that a 747 starts off slowly then halfway down the runway, it’s full throttle? An A380 is full throttle from the start.

Apparently, a lot of pilots are not aware of the origin of this practice. This was not done until the 747 was introduced. Prior to the 747, when…

Why is the Martian soil considered toxic, and how does that affect growing food on Mars?

Sadly, if Mark Watney really had to try and survive by growing potatoes in his own shit, he would still be on Mars – and very dead. What Andy Weir…

Is it true that the Space Shuttle smelled quite bad when ground crews got aboard after a flight to clean and unload?

I worked as a Flight Crew Systems engineer for Lockheed Space Ops and then United Space Alliance, supporting over a hundred missions. Because some of my group took…

How can US Navy carriers that were built 3-4 decades ago be better than Chinese Navy carriers built just 2-3 years ago?

Love this question and I’ll throw my hat into the ring here. The question, for the benefit of the uninformed, is the following: Why is this ship that…

If a nuclear powered aircraft carrier was sunk in deep sea water, would the reactor be cooled enough by the sea, or would it explode?

The only time a nuclear reactor actually exploded was in Chernobyl. It happened because the operators broke a cardinal rule on thermal spectrum nuclear reactors: You NEVER, EVER…

For how long do I have to aim a laser at the moon to see a dot?

There are two possible questions here. The first is simply how long would it take for a laser to travel to the moon and back. The moon is…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *