Our atmosphere is so great that it tickles the moon

The thin outer layer of the earth's atmosphere extends much deeper into space than scientists realized – enough for the moon to turn around.

Earth's geocorone is a rare and poorly understood collection of hydrogen atoms loosely bound by gravity to our planet. This atmospheric region is so thin that on Earth we would call it a void. But it is quite important and powerful to play with ultraviolet telescopes because of its habit of diffusing solar radiation. And researchers, who are analyzing old data from the 1990s, now know that they extend up to 400,000 miles (630,000 km) above the surface of the planet. It's between 10 and 25% farther than the previous estimates.

One of the reasons why geocorone is so poorly understood is that it is difficult to find a point of view from which to study it. From the surface of the Earth and even from its low Earth orbit, it is more or less invisible. The most famous image (pictured above) comes from the 1972 Apollo 16 mission, when the moon, the Earth and the sun aligned to allow astronauts to take a picture of the light of the sun that crossed it. [Infographic: Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom]

As part of this article, published on February 15 in the journal JGR Space Physics, researchers returned to some data from a European Space Agency (ESA) called Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), launched in 1995. to study the sun This probe was launched at a point 930 000 miles (1.5 million km) from the Earth towards the sun, where the gravity of the planet and the stars have combined to keep it in place. Although the craft was instructed to study the sun, he sometimes turned to spy on the Earth from his distant point of observation.

The purpose of these studies was not to map the geocorone, but researchers understood that the data could be used in this way.

"Data archived many years ago can often be exploited for new science," said Bernhard Fleck, scientist of the SOHO project of ESA, in a statement. "This discovery highlights the value of the data collected over 20 years ago and the outstanding performance of SOHO."

The atmosphere

Who knows what other knowledge exists, kept as archived data on a hard drive, waiting for someone to interpret it correctly.

Originally published on Science live.