The Earth's Atmosphere!

The Earth’s atmosphere

The Earth’s atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon 0.04%, carbon dioxide and 1% of other gasses for example helium, neon and methane. As your height increases the atmosphere gets thinner and thinner as it merges with outer space at approximately 10000 km above sea level. The Karman line is defined as the edge of space by astronauts and is about 100km above sea level.

What does the atmosphere do?

There are lots of benefits to the earth’s atmosphere for example:

·         It gives us oxygen for us to breath

·         It absorbs ultra violet light from the sun this UV radiation can cause skin cancer and age skin.

·         The atmosphere also absorbs X-rays and gamma rays and regulates the temperature of the earth thus protecting us from extremes in temperature this is a good thing because it allows water to remain in its liquid form instead of being a gas or ice.

·         The atmosphere protects us from meteoroids by burning them up before they hit the earth this happens by the gases surrounding the meteoroids being compressed this compression creates large amounts of heat and makes the meteoroids burn up.

Although there are lots of benefits to the earth’s atmosphere there are also some drawbacks to it for astronomers for example:

·         Light is refracted and causes stars to twinkle and the clarity of images of the night sky to be effected.

·         The sky is made blue by gas light being scattered through gas molecules

·         The atmosphere is very good at absorbing UV light, gamma rays and X- rays this means that most observatories that require these things to be put on top of big hills where less of their rays will have been absorbed.

The Earth’s atmosphere successfully absorbs most electromagnetic waves but some can successfully pass further than others this picture explains that. The wavelength of the waves can affect how far they can pass and what they are reflected by.

·         The longest waves are reflected back by electrons

·         Slightly shorter wavelengths are absorbed by water vapour and oxygen

·         Infrared radiation is absorbed by water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide

·         Ultraviolet radiation is absorbed by ozone and oxygen

·         X-rays and Gama rays are absorbed by oxygen and nitrogen