How Fire Looks When It Falls

What would happen if you put a GoPro in a closed box with a candle in it and dropped it so it would be in a nearly zerog situation? — What? — It's a spherical flame just like you'd see aboard the space station. In microgravity or zero gravity, flames burn colder and if undisturbed, they'll burn with more of a spherical shape. Flames usually have that teardrop shape because of gravity. Hot air from the burning wick is less dense than cooler air. So the hot air rises up and is replaced by cooler air creating a flow around the flame and that elongates it and it brings in more oxygen to burn brighter. Take away gravity and you no longer have up. So there can be no buoyant force pushing in any one direction and the flame forms a spherical shape. That's what happened here with our flame, which is super cool because that means that we're demonstrating that falling toward the earth pulled down by gravity is just like floating out in space with no gravity at all. Boom. Einsteined. And the thing is, all experiments are indistinguishable between doing them in freef fall with no air resistance and doing them in space. Which is why I was able to feel weightless in a zerog plane earlier this year. The plane was essentially in freef