Our Atmosphere is Escaping!
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Our planet is surrounded by a wispy-thin layer of gas that keeps us warm and allows weather to happen and basically makes all of life on Earth possible. Except... that precious atmosphere of ours is actually leaking, every second, into outer space. Luckily, it's a really slow leak, since for any object--be it a molecule of gas, a rocket, or a cat -- to break the tether of Earth's gravity and escape, it has to hightail it out of here at 34 times the speed of sound. It takes the energy of a metric tonne of TNT to boost a person to that speed, and less energy for lighter objects: 1/10th of that for a cat, for example. Barring a large asteroid impact that can eject large swaths of atmosphere into space, the only gases that regularly escape Earth's atmosphe...
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Our planet is surrounded by a wispy-thin layer of gas that keeps us warm and allows weather to happen and basically makes all of life on Earth possible. Except... that precious atmosphere of ours is actually leaking, every second, into outer space. Luckily, it's a really slow leak, since for any object--be it a molecule of gas, a rocket, or a cat -- to break the tether of Earth's gravity and escape, it has to hightail it out of here at 34 times the speed of sound. It takes the energy of a metric tonne of TNT to boost a person to that speed, and less energy for lighter objects: 1/10th of that for a cat, for example. Barring a large asteroid impact that can eject large swaths of atmosphere into space, the only gases that regularly escape Earth's atmosphe...
