Take the example of certain stars, they collapse on themselves without any force outside. Gravity brings this about.
Now take the example of helium balloon, when it pops. the gas expands rapidly, and the atmosphere outside it actually aids this via diffusion of the gas.
Since we can see that we don't need anything to aid collapse and expansion, we can also safely assume that the lack of anything outside, or inside, doesn't hamper the object in question.
It still can be questionable.
There are instances of stars falling into large black holes, traveling quickly around each other and with very fast rotations, wherein as they approach the black hole, the closer star will negate the gravity of the black hole, sling-shotting the other star far away from the gravitational field of the black hole.
Many modern physicists can provide reason and evidence that all objects in the cosmos are thought to exert a gravity on all other objects, it's just that gravity becomes negligible once you break away from it to a certain point, as far as we are concerned (in fact it is their continual accumulation of facts that has grown this completely dynamic hypothesis about reality). But that doesn't mean we can safely assume anything, necessarily unless one is fine with what seems good enough. Because of this, it's even becoming prominent to think of the rotations of planets and their orbits as being a defining aspect of gravity, one where the dimensions of speed, mass, direction, acceleration, and distance traveled over time of each one needs to be considered relative to one another in order to understand, rather absolutely, what is going to take place.
This even starts to beg the question of whether these things can exist absolutely, since as the definition or order of one dimension changes or is rearranged, the others have to follow suit with that perspective, changing themselves, hence one reason why relativity is studied and thought to be real.
But in your example of the helium balloon popping, you say nothing hampers the object in question. One could say that the helium atoms inside the balloon act as particles (if we accept the notion of particles as spherical-like things) all moving about, compressed (however we want to understand what that compression would mean); it is then the balloon particles which makes this so, acting as a barrier between the helium inside the balloon and the particles outside the balloon. But we could say that the balloon particles also have their own movement of particles, but perhaps not nearly as much as the helium particles, from which they move around each other to some extent, but from our five sense we see and feel no movement. One would then have to conjure the idea of movement by finding evidence to support it, independently of what our common senses might say. In a way it is self-fulfilling, however, sometimes all it takes to disprove common sense is to use common sense and find the absurd. One could argue that as the balloon pops, its rubber tears over time. If the balloon exists strictly as a concrete entity (evenly distributed as a definite thing) and not an abstract one (one of parts that are connected in some way to the matter around it and then are malleable into any part we can conjure), then all it takes to disprove this is to consider taking the rubber and halving it continuously for a very long time; eventually, our senses will be no longer able to find evidence of the balloon existing anymore. But common sense also dictates that it would. In this sense, one might accept and invoke Newton's Third Law and suggest that as the balloon pops, a complex and dynamic process of movement involving particles is taking place, wherein, each dimension of movement I mentioned above is going to have an affect, but also an affect that is not immediate or absolute to all things (not just a movement of immediate reactions like a system of gears, but a unique perhaps non-absolute delay of simultaneous actions and reactions), because if it were immediate, what meaning would time have for us? And really, what use would reality have for us if it was already absolute and determined? It would be somewhat silly for us to even exist at all.
Of course, this leads back to accepting that reality might also be infinite. Some people aren't okay with this, but if they study Modern Physics, it becomes hard to deny such ideas, given the insurmountable evidence in support of it, even if some of it may be based on philosophical notions to disprove what is thought to be common sense.
Don't you find it interesting that as we exist and thrive on this planet, our doing so has almost no affect on the planets around us. And yet, on this planet there are many smaller things that we can discern. Who is to say that an electron can't contain a planet or that a neutron doesn't contain a galaxy? There seems to be two kinds of scientists, one that asks "Where is the beginning and where is the end to some knowledge and why should this be so?" and the other that decides "Here is the beginning and here is the end to some knowledge and this is why it should be so." It's rather funny, I guess, because they both are right in what their objectives aim, but yet are at odds with one another, regardless.