Last night on TV, Stephen Fry insisted that rain drops are spherical. Is he correct ?
Answers:
Yup
Why do you care?!?
No he isn't
Yes, he is. If you see a rain drop in slow motion you will notice this.
Yes but when they fall the air resistance distorts them into more of a pear shape.
yes he's right
YES, look next time you have rain!
The common raindrop is actually shaped more like a hamburger bun!
The best explanation about the shape of raindrops appears on Alistair B. Fraser's Web page titled Bad Rain. Mr. Fraser says:
"The artistic representation of raindrop as presented by popular culture is that of a teardrop. Actually, real raindrops bear scant resemblance to this popular fantasy (except after they have ceased to be raindrops by splattering on a window, say)."
" Virtually everyone from advertisers to illustrators of children's books represent raindrops as being tear-shaped."
yep but due to gravity they appear pear shaped when on things like windows
water droplets ae spherical but if they drop at speed from a height they go pear shaped !
its known as Chaos theory
Yes and no. Interesting question, I looked:
Less than .08" - Retains Spherical Shape - Water Surface Tension
Between .08 & .25" - Air Pressure Flattens Bottom, Sides Bulge - Less Air Pressure
Larger than .25" - Breaks into Smaller Drops - Air Pressure exceeds Surface Tension
Nope, I fairly recently read an article about why raindrops don't just keep accelerating as they fall, and as far as I remember it runs as follows:
When they form, they are roundish, up in the clouds. They are also frozen solid.
They get bigger by layers of water vapour freezing onto the outer surface. (If they fall without melting they are hailstones).
When they are finally too heavy for the air currents inside the clouds to keep them up, they begin to fall. When they warm up a bit en route to the ground, they melt into liquid water. As they pick up speed their air resistance increases.
I always wondered why they didn't just stretch out really thin, but apparently due to forces between the water molecules (Hydrogen bonding due to the polarity of the molecules, if you are interested) the surface tension keeps them quite round and ball like, but (and here is where Stevie F is wrong), the air resistance means they flatten out at the bottom and end up with a very similar shape to the old Apollo Landing craft, a kind of blunt cone shape.
yeah, that is true. Scientist peeps have done studies where they filmed rain drops & stuff, and slowed it down, and they are actually spherical.
Yeah.. but no, but yeah.. it would make sense as they become deformed and pear shaped whilst they fall to earth.
They're hardly likely to be square, are they!! Take a look next time you water your garden or let the tap drip - water tends to come out in droplets which are spheres. Yes?
In a gravity-less vacuum water drops would retain a spherical shape due to the even distribution of surface tension.
When environmental conditions come into play the distribution of the surface tension remains the same but the shape changes due to friction, gravity etc. Drops cannot retain a shape where the length exceeds the diameter (approx)
Yes some are....
Small raindrops (radius < 1 millimeter (mm)) are spherical; larger ones assume a shape more like that of a hamburger bun. When they get larger than a radius of about 4.5 mm they rapidly become distorted into a shape rather like a parachute with a tube of water around the base --- and then they break up into smaller drops."
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