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Balls & bubbles without gravity
Stephanie Wissel (postdoc)
PPPL
The dynamics of the bubbles and splashes produced by a ball impacting water change dramatically when the force due to gravity is removed, leaving the only remaining driving forces: surface tension and inertia. A still shot from an experiment designed to investigate such a phenomenon shows that the bubble formed underneath the water's surface expands rapidly and forms a jet, while the water above the surface gently floats away. Here the ball bounces off the bottom of the tank through the ever growing bubble.