New research finds Earth’s atmosphere extends way past moon

According to a new research, scientists have discovered that Earth’s thin outermost layer is much bigger and deeper than previously thought to be, deep enough that it envelops the moon too.

A new study on observations made over 20 years by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) shows that the Earth’s geocorona extends up to 630,000km above Earth’s surface – between 10% and 25% farther than previous estimates.

Geocorona is a thin, light layer of loosely bound hydrogen atoms and separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. As per Live Science, despite being thin, the layer is powerful enough to mess with ultraviolet telescopes due to its habit of scattering solar radiation.

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The distance is 50 times Earth’s diameter and almost twice the distance to the moon. “The moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere. We were not aware of it until we dusted off observations made over two decades ago by the SOHO spacecraft,” said lead author Igor Baliukin.

Since the presence of hydrogen in a planet’s outer atmosphere is usually a sign of water vapor down near the surface, scientists believe that this discovery is astounding since it could help guide their search for watery planets outside of our solar system, as per Daily Mail.

Though the extra hydrogen atoms found won’t be useful for future missions to the moon, but it can be helpful to made future astronomical observations more precise.

“On Earth we would call it vacuum, so this extra source of hydrogen is not significant enough to facilitate space exploration,” said Baliukin. ‘But, space telescopes observing the sky in ultraviolet wavelengths to study the chemical composition of stars and galaxies would need to take this into account.”