Scientists Discover That Earth's Atmosphere Stretches Beyond The Moon

Space Physics has just published new research showing that the outermost part of the Earth's atmosphere has stretched out of the Moon and farther than before.

There is a cloud of hydrogen atoms known by scientists as geocorona, emitted where our atmosphere is exposed to outer space. Igor Baliukin, the leader of the research team at the Russian Space Research Institute, said that the gas layer is 50 times larger than the diameter of our planet.

Earth’s geocorona from the Moon

The expansion of the Earth's atmosphere has been farther than predicted by the Southwest Research Institute by six times (over 530,000 kilometers) and beyond the distance from the green planet to the Moon.

Baliukin reported to the European Space Agency (ESA) that the results show that the Moon is now in the Earth's atmosphere.

Earth’s geocorona

SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) - a satellite lying in the direction of the sun nearly 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, collected data and images for this study. The observations were made in the period 1996-1998, not long after the launch of SOHO, when the satellite was in the right position to shoot an ultraviolet image of the atmosphere of the Earth with sensors capable of mapping geocorona.

SOHO

Baliukin said it has been two decades since observations of the atmosphere area have been identified, so far we have discovered its change.

According to the research team, data gathered years ago can be useful for new science, like the findings, which they could use to search for other planets with water sources.

The existence of water on a certain planet would be more possible if there were hydrogen in their exospheres. Geocorona of a planet can be seen as a way for us to determine the existence of water on that planet. Typically, hydrogen in the Earth's geocorona shows abundant water resources on our planet.

The method of finding hydrogen vapor in the geocorona of other planets can be very important in the search for a new planet for humans in the universe.