A blast of sound could be used to put out fires in spacecraft.
Regular fire extinguishers are useless in microgravity, as the foam spreads everywhere. So Dmitriy Plak and his colleagues at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, US, wondered if sound would work instead.
In an earthbound experiment, they extinguished a candle flame with a 120-decibel 55-hertz tone. They do not yet know why it works, but speculate that the sound waves create a local pressure drop at the flame, causing either the oxygen concentration or the temperature to fall enough to put out the fire.
Astronauts would need…
