Cells, especially plant cells can withstand much more than 1 Bar of pressure difference. A plant will not start to boil in a vacuum, contrary to other comments. Every land organism has gone though a great deal of evolution to make sure it doesn’t loose to much (or any) water though evaporation on its surface.
However plants require on pressure and evaporation to pull water from the roots to the leaves. It will loose its water through its stromata in the leaves a loot more than normal. If the roots are in water it will be ok, just dry out the ground realy quickly.
Most likely the leaves will die fairly quickly, followed by the roots. The cambium of a woody plant will probably not even notice the vacuum for a few months. Just like in winter it will basically hibernate beneath the bark and form new sprouts once it is in atmosphere again.
You will probably have to cut away some dead wood to expose the living cambium and initiate regrowth of roots and new sprouts but a tree will be able to regrow after being in a vacuum for a (relatively) long ass time. Think of a tree stump getting new sprouts around the outer edge a year after it was cut down.
No idea about radiation and heat though. If it is floating in direkt sunlight its probably fucked after a few days.
You left out the temperature,though. Regular space temperature would kill any cells very very fast and the temperature change would do the rest.
A vacuum is a great insulator, though. It may well cool slowly enough to go dormant and eventually vitrify, if it’s something cold-adapted.
I feel like if its losing a lot of water through evaporation then it’s also losing heat that way as well
Well, yes, if it loses a ton of water it will get cold and freeze. OP suggested water loss would be fairly manageable, though. I guess the question is just how much it would lose, exactly.
I guess it’s also worth noting we’re assuming deep space here. OP didn’t specify, if you’re right next to a star you have the opposite problem.
I was going to say anything except maybe an aridity-adapted plant would dry out very quickly through those stomata, because it would be boiling off. I kind of forgot about the non-leaf plant parts, though.
I think a grown tree would should out pretty long. The pressure in the tracheids is so low already that water should be boiling inside a tree in normal atmospheric conditions. The capillary forces of the narrow tube and the surface tension of water hold the water liquid. I could imagine the water in the top 10% of the tracheids evaporating in less then a minute but the rest will take a long time to drive out. I might be wrong though I couldn’t find any papers on plants in vacuum. Lots about zero gravity and space radiation though…
Interesting, that’s a lot longer then I would have assumed. Now I am curious how long a seed would survive in sunlight before losing visibility.
The pot of petunias are dead on impact
Oh, not again…
Somebody with a vacuum chamber please put a plant in it for science
The water in the plant would immediately begin to boil (not because of heat, but because of the lack of air pressure in the vacuum of space), probably rupturing the cell walls of most cells I would think.
So to answer your question would probably be: The plant could continue to grow in space for a few fractions of a second.
It depends on the plant, moss apparently is pretty hardy. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)02088-7
Hard to say. For a small plant with low water content, I could imagine that it would be effectively cryogenically preserved, meaning indefinitely. An aloe or other succulent, for example, would freeze and die. But maybe a stem cutting or woody plant might survive. Or a moss or lichen (though lichen aren’t plants). Assuming it doesn’t get baked by unfiltered sunlight or destroyed by high-energy radiation.
Things don’t freeze in space. It’s actually very hard to lose heat in space because a vacuum is a very good insulator. If it’s in direct sunlight it’ll get hot.
Also to freeze you need moisture, which typically boils off in a vacuum.
It’s a nitpick, but boiling causes cooling. If you dump water into space you actually do get a mix of ice and steam/vapour.
Otherwise, yes. If we assume most of the water is still inside the plant it will take some time to cool.
The best chance would probably be for some dry seeds.
I don’t have any real expertise here. But my bet is that it would die pretty much instantly as all the water in its cells boiled off and burst all the cell walls.
