Does farting make you lighter or heavier ?
Does farting make you lighter or heavier ?
So yeah, as the title says. If you fart do you become lighter because you loose mass or does the loss of buoyancy make you heavier ?
26 comments
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Farts are mostly particulate. So, you'd be lighter.Edit: I did not have "researching farts" on my dance card today, but here we are - I have inadvertently repeated a misnomer. While flatulence can be accompanied by aerosolized liquid, microbial elements, and particulate fecal matter, our gut is actually much more efficient than previously thought at separating gasses. Healthy farts do not contain a significant amount of non-gaseous material. A tiny bit of such material would weigh more than the gaseous content, hence the misnomer that farts are mostly liquid and solid material by weight.
As the gasses contain hydrogen and sometimes methane, they are indeed lighter than air, on average. They may also contain sulfides and carbon dioxide that are heavier than air, but in smaller quantities.
So, according to flatus experts (yes, that's a thing), yes, farting on Earth likely makes you heavier.
For those who want to suffer as I have, here is a fairly comprehensive article on the matter.
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m.. mostly?
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Please discuss this with your doctor.
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On top of the fact that the gases have lower molecular weights than air, they are also at 37°C or 310K ie ~5% lighter still.
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I think "mostly particulate" would have to cause visible exhaust fumes 😅
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Makes me muuuuuch lighter. At least that's the feeling in my belly!
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That is less pressure, not weight.
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As a homogenous blob, you would become lighter and denser.
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You get heavier, totally anecdotal evidence on my part but I've stepped on the scale in the morning, let a glorious one rip, and the number went up by 0.1.
I am not saying that I gained 0.1 lbs, just that afterward the scale rounded it up instead of down.
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Sounds like solid scientific research to me, I will now carry this nugget of information as an absolute fact.
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I think, you get lighter from the thrust, and the loss of those rarefied substances also reduce your mass.
26 comments
A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_versus_weight.
~~Methane weighs more than nitrogen (70% of atmosphere); you lose weight and mass. Molar mass of nitrogen 7; methane 16. ~~
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/19776581
Edited to comment about mass: Except that a) methane is leaving the body and is not necessarily being replaced; the volume is simply taken up by a contracting colon and b) methane may be less dense than air, but it does contain fecal particles as well, which are tiny but still heavier than air.
This guy farts.
But he doesn't let it weigh him down.
That's not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).
The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it's in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.
Is there a measure for the force exerted on the ground for something then? Such that a balloon would be 0
Methane is lighter than air. Methane is indeed ~16 but nitrogen has atomic number 7, molecular mass ~14, and the molecules are N2, so ~28.
The molar mass of elemental nitrogen is 14, not 7. However, its equilibrium state in our atmosphere is as N2 which has a molar mass of 28.
At room temperature methane is lighter than the atmosphere on Earth's surface, not heavier.
However, pressurized in your body it may he heavier. I see no studies measuring this.
One of those interesting facts I like and will bring up sometimes, the pound and the gram aren't just different scales for the same thing since the pound is the measure of weight or force and the gram is the measure of mass. In the vast majority of cases most people encounter in everyday life they'll be roughly interchangeable if you convert, most things being done at roughly 1g with extremely minor variations for location that won't come up unless you're doing super precise measurements, buoyancy won't come into play for majority of things most people are measuring in day to day, etc.
The pound is actually a unit of mass. What you're thinking of is the pound-force.