Huh? That makes no sense. Moreover, there is NO hydrogen or helium in our atmosphere. Any that we might have once had is long gone. Given the very large average height and correspondingly high average speed (and much higher speed in the high-speed tail of the distribution), these very-low-mass species can simply escape from Earth. More dramatically, the gravitational field of low-mass objects such as asteroids is too small to keep an atmosphere of any kind.
Bruce On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 6:09 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[email protected]> wrote: > As, oddly, no one seems to have mentioned it yet... I'm pretty sure that air > does separate. Am I wrong to think that "air" at a high enough altitude is > mostly hydrogen? So the question is not what keeps it from separating, but > what keeps it from separating more fully... right? > > Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
