Is Earth's Atmosphere an Import?

garg0yle writes "One of the questions about the formation of our planet is: where did the atmosphere come from? One theory is that the oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases were part of the coalescing ball, and 'seeped out' during the final stages of the planet's formation. However, a new article at Wired says isotopic analysis of krypton and xenon indicates that they (and the rest of our atmosphere) may be of extraterrestrial origin, either arriving via comets or being swept up from gas clouds."

Who cares?

[phantomcircuit]

Honestly who cares?

This has zero relevance to our basic understanding of the formation of the planets. The atmosphere is from some part of space. Whether it is from asteroids more recently than the late stages of the earths formation is kind of useless information.

Re:Who cares?

[Kerrigann]

Maybe it would give us hints about what to look for in other solar systems when looking for rocky planets with similar atmospheres?

Maybe it would tell us something about whether or not our type of atmosphere is rare in the universe?

Who knows, it might be useful. It should be at least as useful as studying the mating habits of the short-tailed horned lizard, or a million other things scientists study.

Re:Who cares?

[kraydel]

I don't know about that being irrelevant information. The formation of our planet seems like something we may want to get as much information as possible about, because it may explain the development of other features, which, in turn, may lead to deeper knowledge about how other planets work.

Science?

[jwiegley]

How the HELL did this article get filed under "science".

Venus has a significant atmosphere. Saturn has an atmosphere. Neptune... atmosphere. Jupiter... ALL atmosphere. Hey, look at that! All the planets larger than Mars have a significantly thick atmosphere.

Maybe it's as simple as their gravity is sufficient to trap gasses.

Please refile this article under "Intellectually Bankrupt" instead.

Re:Who cares?

[TapeCutter]

The entire Earth came from dust and gas. Sure some of it may have arrived a little late in big chunks or clouds but the reason our atmosphere has the composition it does now is that life changed it from something like Titan's atmosphere to what we see today. In otherwords life and the atmosphere co-evolved on this planet and they continue to do so, neither would exist in their current form without the other.

The atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere are collectively know as the biosphere. If we find a spectra from another planet's atmosphere that has a similar composition to ours then our current state of knowledge would demand the conclusion that life created it. And yeah, it's worthwhile looking. IIRC scientists have already determined the atmospheric composition of several exoplanets.

Re:Who cares?

[martas]

the full implications of knowledge cannot be predicted.

the distribution of gas

[Anonymous Coward]

in any vertical column region of the atmosphere there is a distribution of the molecules of a gas which should be exponential in density and a function of the partial pressure and molecular mass of the gas.