Somebody with a vacuum chamber please put a plant in it for science
The pot of petunias are dead on impact
Oh, not again…
The water in the plant would immediately begin to boil (not because of heat, but because of the lack of air pressure in the vacuum of space), probably rupturing the cell walls of most cells I would think.
So to answer your question would probably be: The plant could continue to grow in space for a few fractions of a second.
Hard to say. For a small plant with low water content, I could imagine that it would be effectively cryogenically preserved, meaning indefinitely. An aloe or other succulent, for example, would freeze and die. But maybe a stem cutting or woody plant might survive. Or a moss or lichen (though lichen aren’t plants). Assuming it doesn’t get baked by unfiltered sunlight or destroyed by high-energy radiation.
Things don’t freeze in space. It’s actually very hard to lose heat in space because a vacuum is a very good insulator. If it’s in direct sunlight it’ll get hot.
Also to freeze you need moisture, which typically boils off in a vacuum.
It’s a nitpick, but boiling causes cooling. If you dump water into space you actually do get a mix of ice and steam/vapour.
Otherwise, yes. If we assume most of the water is still inside the plant it will take some time to cool.
The best chance would probably be for some dry seeds.
It depends on the plant, moss apparently is pretty hardy. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)02088-7
I don’t have any real expertise here. But my bet is that it would die pretty much instantly as all the water in its cells boiled off and burst all the cell walls.
