• Question: if you bounced a bouncy ball on a hard surface in space what would happen?

    Asked by Flo to Daniel, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      It would bounce! That would be quite a fun experiment to try 😀
      It’s called conservation of momentum. Basically, if an object is moving and hits another object all the movement has to balance out. Assuming the hard surface doesn’t move at all, that means the ball has too!
      Without gravity the ball just doesn’t fall downwards meaning it would bounce for ages!
      Imagine bouncing a bouncy ball between two hard surfaces. The only way to lose momentum would be through friction of the ball against the hard surface, it would just keep going up and down (or left to right). I really want to try this now.
      Brilliant question,
      Ryan

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      Good question!
      I’m not totally sure – at first I thought it would be something like these old arcades games:

      where it just bounces around forever.
      But actually, gravity is a ‘conservative force’, it doesn’t do any work, so it doesn’t ever take any energy away from the ball. When a ball bounces, it loses energy to the surface in the form of heat (from friction), and that still happens in space. So if you bounced a ball between two horizontal plates, I think it would actually bounce left and right just the same way in space as it does on Earth!

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      If you bounced a ball on a hard surface in space it would still bounce back like on Earth. But it would be a lot slower because there is no gravity. Astronaut Scott Kelly did something similar with balls of water:

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