Sunday, 21 February 2010

What's the significance of finding neon on lunar atmospehere? new explanation of moon light?

The moon's "atmosphere" isn't much of an atmosphere, and is sometimes called an exosphere. The particle density in the moon's atmosphere is low enough to be considered a very good vacuum for Earth experiments.



The discovery is mentioned in this article on phys.org, which specifically says




There's not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon's atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere at sea level.



...



The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules. However, the moon's atmosphere is technically referred to as an exosphere because it's so thin, its atoms rarely collide.




As far as the question "what's the importance" in your title, it seems mainly to be a confirmation of something that has been predicted for a while, as well as providing more data concerning exospheres: the most common type of "atmosphere" in the solar system.

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