600
submitted 11 months ago by Stamets@startrek.website to c/tumblr@lemmy.world
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 31 points 11 months ago

Even without air resistance rain wouldn’t come at once.

Depending on how literally you take “no air resistance” it could mean no wind at all to no friction to slow rain.

In the first interpretation water vapour goes up straight continuously and creates layers of density proportional to the amount of sun/heat hitting the lake. Eventually the vapour reaches critical altitude and accumulates there.

Because evaporation is always happening and moves discrete particles of water randomly, there would still be particles if water coalescing into drops of rain. Think of it kind of like the same effect as raindrops hitting your windshield and combining until they get heavy enough to slide down, not a wall of water.

And in the second interpretation I hope it’s now clear that this would result in painful rain drops with high velocity, but still not a thick sheet of it.

[-] Nougat@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago

If there wasn't an atmosphere to provide resistance, there wouldn't be water vapor suspended in it, there wouldn't be dust particles suspended in it to provide places for condensation to happen.

With no air resistance, there wouldn't be rain in the first place.

[-] cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago

I took the liberty of assuming there is air, it just doesn’t “move” or impede the process of evaporation.

You can evaporate water in a vacuum, so you could have an atmosphere with no other gasses than water and still get rain. The process of condensation should still work. I think the concept of air gets weird though…

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/424193

this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
600 points (98.2% liked)

tumblr

3318 readers
174 users here now

Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.

Our Rules:

  1. Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.

  2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.

  3. Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.

  4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.

  5. No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.


Sister Communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS