How would a corpse be preserved in outer space conditions?

Suppose you were puttering around the solar system and came across the remains of a luxury passenger vessel, the intergalactic equivalent of the Titanic, adrift about one AU from the sun. The hull was shattered, with thousands of souls aboard living in a comfortable, shirt-sleeve environment before meeting a sudden and horrible death. But instead of freezing seawater, the human remains were left entombed in outer space. What do they look like, after 73 years (the same number of years between the sinking of the Titanic and its discovery in 1985)?

• Would they be completely intact? Merely recognizable? Atomized?
• What tissues would remain? Would they be discolored? Scarred? Burned?
• Would their bodily fluids have frozen? Boiled away?
• Would they be stiff, brittle, or pliable? How would zero gravity pose them?
• Would they be distorted in shape, e.g. tend toward becoming spherical?
• Would their clothes be preserved, tattered, or obliterated?
• Would the bodies be completely still, or would they be rotating? Perhaps slowly and in unison (creepy!) due to angular momentum?

Looking for the realistic, gory details.

posted almost 6 years ago

John Wu‭

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