How Do We Know What Air is Like on Other Planets?
How do we know what the air is like on planets we haven't visited? This video explains how to see air from 150 light years away. Thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope project at the...
==========
We know that Jupiter has an atmosphere made up mainly of hydrogen and helium. Europa,a moon of Jupiter, has a very thin oxygen atmosphere, and HD 209458 b, a Jupiter-sizedexoplanet orbiting the star HD 209458 which is 154 lightyears away, has an atmospherethat contains hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, sodium, carbon dioxide, methane, and even water vapor.All this even though we haven’t visited any of these places to directly sample theair... but we don’t need to.We can study the air on other planets, moons, and exoplanets just by looking at them. Inparticular, by looking at light that bounces off or passes through their atmospheres, becausewhen you shine light on a gas, the molecules absorb and scatter different frequencies ofthat light in different amounts. If we then split...
==========
We know that Jupiter has an atmosphere made up mainly of hydrogen and helium. Europa,a moon of Jupiter, has a very thin oxygen atmosphere, and HD 209458 b, a Jupiter-sizedexoplanet orbiting the star HD 209458 which is 154 lightyears away, has an atmospherethat contains hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, sodium, carbon dioxide, methane, and even water vapor.All this even though we haven’t visited any of these places to directly sample theair... but we don’t need to.We can study the air on other planets, moons, and exoplanets just by looking at them. Inparticular, by looking at light that bounces off or passes through their atmospheres, becausewhen you shine light on a gas, the molecules absorb and scatter different frequencies ofthat light in different amounts. If we then split...
