Astronomers have notice a faint green glow in the ambiance of Mars due to the presence of O . This phenomenon is well known on Earth where the gleam can be see in the aurorae and at the edge of the atmosphere , but it has never been seen around another human beings before .
spot by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos ’ ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter ( TGO ) , the observation are report inNature Astronomy . The spacecraft has been circle Mars since October 2016 , its instruments monitoring the composition of the ambiance and how it changes with the seasons .
“ One of the brightest discharge seen on Earth stem from night luminescence . More specifically , from oxygen atoms breathe a particular wavelength of brightness that has never been seen around another major planet , ” conduce author Dr Jean - Claude Gérard of the Université de Liège , said in astatement . “ However , this emission has been predicted to exist at Mars for around 40 year – and , thanks to TGO , we ’ve found it . ”
Mars ' air is just 1 percent of Earth ’s own in terms of atmospheric pressure and is overwhelmingly made of carbon dioxide . consort to the survey , the atomic number 8 find here is a direct product of that atomic number 6 dioxide . A pocket-sized fraction of those molecules is broken apart by the ultraviolet light from the Sun , loose carbon monoxide and O .
The oxygen is attend glowing in visible Inner Light but also in the ultraviolet . The seeable emission is 16.5 times stronger than the UV one , something quite unlike from our planet ’s own .
“ The observation at Mars agree with premature theoretical theoretical account but not with the actual glowing we ’ve spot around Earth , where the visible emission is far sapless , ” add Dr Gérard . “ This evoke we have more to acquire about how oxygen molecule behave , which is hugely important for our understanding of nuclear and quantum physics . ”
The observations were conducted last year , between April 24 and December 1 , 2019 , using the NOMAD(Nadir and Occultation for Mars Discovery)suite of instruments to scan the standard atmosphere of Mars from 20 - 400 kilometre ( 12.4 - 249 miles ) in EL . The cat’s-paw were aimed at the boundary of the planet , and the observations were conducted twice every orbit or about 24 sentence per Clarence Day . The oxygen emission was present in every single observation .
“ The discharge was strongest at an altitude of around 80 km and wide-ranging reckon on the alter distance between Mars and the Sun , ” say co - source Dr Ann Carine Vandaele of the Institut Royal d’Aéronomie Spatiale de Belgique , Belgium , Principal Investigator of NOMAD .
There are still many unknowns when it comes to the Martian standard pressure but these kinds of observations allow newfangled manner to probe the phylogeny of the planet ’s atmosphere over time .
