Tom Scott Sends Garlic Bread to the Edge of Space, Then Eats It

[old_gus]

https://youtu.be/c8W-auqg024

[Zergeant]

Is it really 5.5 C at the edge of space? That's quite warm for 1% air pressure but I suppose there's more pure sunrays up there.

Speaking of sunrays, doesn't that mean the garlic bread has been irradiated with space dust.

[Clovis]

This thread is ratings gold.
It's nowhere near the edge of space. I find it frustrating when these balloon people suggest that. It's true that the atmosphere gets less dense in a sort of logarithmic, not linear, trajectory, as in, far less dense even 50% up. Still, 35km is simply nowhere near the edge of space. Some planes such as the SR-71 fly almost as high.

[Zergeant]

Sounds like my kind of trip

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSWuoZYMPjoIavpVHicxQeOiy4zanu_rZ3LJtto37TXIRsAMJtV

[EddieLTU]

a proud moment for any Garlic Bread enthusiast.

[Clovis]

Ego death ftw.

[Headhumpy]

Temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere, but after the tropopause, it increases with altitude instead. The tropopause is usually found between 10-18 km altitude, so the balloon would've been well into the stratosphere at its peak. In fact, if you keep track of the temperatures as it rises, you can see that around 13 km it stops decreasing, and then from then it starts to increase again.

The reason temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere is because the sun warms up the Earth's surface, which in turn heats up air near the ground. The warm air rises due to convection and as it does, it expands and cools. Within the stratosphere, however, absorption of solar radiation by molecular oxygen and ozone is significant, and this heats up the air within the stratosphere. Since the outermost layers will experience more radiation, they will be hotter. This sets up a positive temperature gradient (warm air higher up, cool air lower down), so no convection happens.

[Big D Duchovny]

Can you really call the Karman line completely arbitrary? I mean, it says something sorta useful about the atmosphere at that altitude. Well, I guess a better question is whether it's arbitrary to a higher degree than so many other things.

[Hickleberry]

Curious, why can't we see stars? Something to do with the camera exposure?

[Rubber Ducky]

Pretty much, yeah. It's the same reason we can't see stars in the middle of the day -- the earth is much, much brighter when lit up by the sun.

[Johnny on Flame]

"And that's how I got my superpowers"