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Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere
IHateEverybody writes "Scientists have found evidence that the solar wind is ripping off chunks of the Martian atmosphere, which could possibly explain why Mars has such a thin atmosphere today. The chunks are being ripped up along 'magnetic umbrellas,' which are bubbles of magnetic fields which rise from the ground and extend above the Martian atmosphere. This is surprising because scientists previously thought that these magnetic umbrellas protected the Martian atmosphere. Now it looks like exactly the opposite might be true."
if this is possible on mars, what different properties does earth have to stop our atmosphear from one day just disapearing?
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At least it's not ripping up Uranus.
at least we may know what to fix if we *ever* were to terraform that big red rock
Or do we just leave that as an extra credit exercise for the students?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
We have a large shield around our planet, which has a special, secret password. No one can ever strip aweay our atmosphere, no matter how much they suck or blow.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Well actually, we know that Venus was catastophically resurfaced a few hundred million years ago, because impact craters are evenly distributed accross the surface (according to the Magellan data), so the parts of the surface are all the same age. The outgassing from such an enormous event, is likely to be the current atmosphere, which the sun has been gradually eroding ever since.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
The core of the earth will cool long before the sun goes red dwarf.
I think you mean red giant (red dwarf is a main stage star - our sun is a yellow dwarf that will eventually become red giant then a white dwarf).
Either way, the core of the Earth should be molten well past that event. Increasing temperatures (from various factors - both man made global warming but also the sun emits more and more heat as time goes on) are a far more serious concern than the atmosphere blowing away.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Most scientists think that Mars was once a lot more like Earth in that it had flowing, a thicker atmosphere, and possibly life.
The sun won't go "red dwarf," it will turn into a red giant and will almost certainly swallow up Venus before it runs out of fuel and turns into a white dwarf. Long before any of that happens, the sun will have gotten hot enough to boil away Earth's oceans. The most common figures that I've seen is something like a 500 million to a billion years before the sun boils the oceans and makes Earth uninhabitable and five billion years before it turns into a red giant and swallows up Mercury and Venus. So we do have some time before we need to move.
Does this