How Powerful Can I Get an Airsoft Gun

What would happen if you shot a gun in infinite?

Fires can't fire in the oxygen-gratis vacuum of space, but gunstin can shoot. Modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, a chemical that will trigger the explosion of gunpowder, and thus the firing of a bullet, wherever you are in the universe. No atmospheric oxygen required.

The but difference betwixt pulling the trigger on Earth and in infinite is the shape of the resulting smoke trail. In space, "it would be an expanding sphere of smoke from the tip of the barrel," said Peter Schultz an astronomer at Brown University who researches impact craters.

The possibility of gunfire in space allows for all kinds of absurd scenarios.

Related: 7 everyday things that happen strangely in space

Shooting stars

Imagine you're floating freely in the vacuum between galaxies — just you, your gun and a unmarried bullet. You accept two options. You either tin spend all of eternity trying to effigy out how you got there, or yous can shoot the damn cosmos.

If you do the latter, Newton's third law of movement dictates that the strength exerted on the bullet will impart an equal and opposite force on the gun, and, because you're holding the gun, you. With very few intergalactic atoms against which to brace yourself, you'll start moving backward (not that yous'd have any fashion of knowing). If the bullet leaves the gun barrel at i,000 meters per second, you — because you're much more massive than it is — will head the other way at only a few centimeters per second.

Once shot, the bullet will go on going, quite literally, forever. "The bullet volition never stop, considering the universe is expanding faster than the bullet can catch up with any serious amount of mass" to slow it down, said Matija Cuk, an astronomer with joint appointments at Harvard University and the SETI Institute. (If the universe weren't expanding, then the i or two atoms per cubic centimeter encountered past the bullet in the near-vacuum of space would bring it to a standstill after 10 million lite-years.)

Getting down to details, the universe expands at a rate of 73 kilometers per 2nd per megaparsec (nearly iii million light-years, or the average distance between galaxies). By Cuk's calculations, this ways matter that is xl,000 to 50,000 light-years away from the bullet would move away from information technology at about the same speed at which it is travelling, and would thus exist forever out of reach. In the unabridged time to come of the universe, the bullet will catch up only to atoms that are less than forty,000 or and then lite-years from the bedroom of your gun.

Speaking of you, you'll exist bobbing through space forever, too.

Related: In images: Visualizations of infinity

When you shoot a gun in space, things can get pretty weird. — When yous shoot a gun in space, things can get pretty weird. (Epitome credit: NASA (astronaut image))

Shooting giants from the hip

Guns do actually get carried to space, though not quite to the void between galaxies. For decades, the standard survival pack for Russian cosmonauts has included a gun. Until recently, it wasn't but any gun, just "a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete," co-ordinate to space historian James Oberg. The infinite guns are issued in case the cosmonauts need one dorsum on Earth, so that they tin can protect themselves if emergency landing of their Soyuz spacecraft has left them deserted in a treacherous region. But still, cosmonautsin theory could shoot their guns earlier they landed.

So what if, during a spacewalk, a cosmonaut opened fire on Jupiter?

He or she should feel free to shoot from the hip. Co-ordinate to Robert Flack, a physicist at Academy College London, the enormous gravitational field of Jupiter is likely to suck in a bullet fifty-fifty if it is desperately aimed. "Jupiter is and then huge, it volition capture the bullet and then it volition follow a curved path down into the planet," Flack said.

And as information technology does, it will selection up some serious steam. Co-ordinate to Schultz, if the bullet is shot directly toward Jupiter, the planet's gravity will accelerate the ammo to the eye-popping speed of nearly 60 kilometers per second past the time it crosses the gas behemothic's threshold.

Watch your dorsum

Shooting someone in the back is a cowardly human action. In space, "theoretically you could shootyourself in the back," Schultz said.

Y'all could do information technology, for example, while in orbit around a planet. Because objects orbiting planets are really in a constant state of gratis autumn, you have to become the setup simply right. You'd accept to shoot horizontally at just the right altitude for the bullet to circle the planet and fall back to where it started (you). And y'all'd also take to consider how much you lot'll get kicked backwards (and consequently, how much your altitude will change) when you lot fire.

"The aim has to exist perfect," Schultz said.

Such a scenario isn't as absurd as it sounds. In fact, Schultz said scientists at i signal were considering setting up such a self-hitting in infinite in order to investigate the furnishings of high-speed impacts.

Withal, considering all the math involved, Cuk suggests it might be easier to commit space suicide past standing on a mountain on the moon. "'Shooting yourself in the dorsum' works in principle if you shoot a bullet at horizon from the elevation of a lunar mount, at 1600 meters per second or and so," he said. He thinks it just might work as long as you accommodate your aim to account for lumps and irregularities in the shape of the moon, which would bear on the distance of the bullet equally it travels.

With so many possible movie plotlines to consider, one question remains: Why are there so few space shoot 'em ups?

Originally published on Live Scientific discipline.

Natalie Wolchover was a staff author for Live Science from 2010 to 2012. She hold a bachelor'southward caste in physics from Tufts Academy and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Follow Natalie on Google+.