The atmosphere of the Earth extends far beyond the Moon!

The atmosphere of the Earth extends far beyond the Moon!

Researchers believe that tiny clots of terrestrial air go far into space far beyond the limits of the moon's orbit. It turns out that the Earth's geokoron (a small cloud of hydrogen atoms) is pulled out to 630,000 km into space. For you to understand, the moon is removed from us on average 384,600 km.

It turns out that the moon rotates in the earth's atmosphere. And scientists for a long time did not know about this until they reviewed the observations made more than 20 years ago by the SOHO apparatus. We are talking about a spacecraft, launched in December 1995. His goal is to study the solar and cosmic weather.

The atmosphere of the Earth extends far beyond the Moon!

A cloud of hydrogen atoms (geocorona) is visible where the earth's atmosphere collides with space. New data suggests that this cloud extends far beyond the lunar orbit, reaching 630,000 km above the surface of the planet

Scientists analyzed the archived information from the SWAN instrument, capturing data on Lyman-alpha radiation. The solar wind is in contact with the hydrogen atoms of the geocorona at the Lyman-alpha wavelength, which is blocked by the earth's atmosphere (therefore, it must be observed from space). This work allowed us to form a map of the geocorona length and get an idea of ​​the density of this area. It turns out that geocorona is denser on the day side due to compression from solar radiation. However, everything is relative, because only 70 hydrogen atoms per cm 3 are observed on the day side at an altitude of 60,000 km, and 0.2 atoms per cm 3 at a distance of the Moon.

The atmosphere of the Earth extends far beyond the Moon!

The Earth and its hydrogen envelope (geocorr) in observation from the moon in ultraviolet light. The picture was taken in 1972 by astronauts of the Apollo 16 mission.

Researchers have long known about the existence of the earth geocorns. The Apollo 16 astronauts managed to capture this feature from the moon in 1972. However, no one knew about its exact size and what it is.

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