If someone threw my body into outer space when I die, would it decay even though there would be no bacteria to eat it?
Well, it wouldn’t last forever, if that’s what you mean. It would eventually disintegrate due to dust particle collisions, and would be eroded by energetic ions. Here’s some info:http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/EISclark.html
The bacteria, they’re already inside you.
Well once his body heat is radiated off they’d be FROZEN bacteria.
He’d be something of a frozen pizza if you left it in the back of the freezer for… oh… several years. Not rotten… But nothing all that pleasant looking either.
My body heat wouldn’t be radiated off?!?!?!?!?
What if I was thrown towards the sun?
Is Badastronomy still in the house?
I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that the first thing which would happen is that your bodily fluids would boil off pretty fast. Since the human body is something like 2/3 water, there wouldn’t be much left of you. Probably a lot of the remainder would crumble into dust and disperse.
But I think the skeleton might hang around for a while.
Again, this is just my WAG.
Since we are not made of dust, I don’t see any mechanism in space that would turn flesh into dust. I think a corpse would desiccate into frozen space jerky.
In 3001: The Final Odyssey, astronaut Frank Poole is healed and restored to consciousness and good health by human doctors despite having been killed, essentially freeze-dried and left adrift in space a millennium before. Implausible, sure, but remember Clarke’s Third Law!
That’d be so cool! A bone-yard in space…I like it.
The OP is basically describing freeze drying which is a good way to preserve perishable items for a long time. On-board bacteria would face a very hostile environment, with neither the temperature nor the moisture they need to survive.
Band name!
Sorry.
My WAG is that your WAG is wrong. All those fluids are contained inside you. I think you would just swell up a bit.
My WAG is better than both your WAGs, because it is not a WAG. 
They would survive better than you’d think, since freeze drying or freezing at -80C is the preferred method of keeping bacterial culture stocks. They would not be active at these temperatures though, so the effect is the same until you brought your space jerky back into a warm humid environment.
Well, it’s not like nothing can leak out.
I think that’s a good point. If beef jerky doesn’t crumble, then human flesh arguably should not crumble when dessicated.
Well if your orbit brought you close to the sun you’d be, in effect, a comet of sorts. The heat from the sun would probably heat to boiling some of the fluids causing some of them to spew out your various orifices. The rest would be inside, kept at some reasonable temperature, I’d assume. I bet, given a good sun roasting and the fact that your deep insides would be protected from radiation… That we could have a teeming biological mess inside a charred vaguely human shaped comet.
I can’t believe I wasted several minutes of my life theorizing about this disturbing image.
And from Davekhps’s second link:
Turns out I was incorrect about my heat radiating off theory.
I bet, though, over time lots of water would boil away from the tongue and eyes until there was little heat left. Maybe, though, if the liquid in the feet and torso were still around while the vascular systems to the head finally froze shut some heat could be retained… Leaving the guts to do what they may over a good period of time.
Would sweat glands be porous enough to allow a suction via vacuum from the body then boiling off due to the low pressure? It’d be the exact same mechanism as sweat, though automatically done by vacuum rather than by secretions. If so, the temp would drop down a lot faster.
It should be noted that “space is cold” only applies far away from any stars. If you were left in Earth orbit, then you’d receive heat from the Sun, and settle in to about the same average temperature as the Earth itself (which after all, is also floating in space).