From Inverse by PASSANT RABIE
On January 20-21, 2019, planet Earth came between the Sun and the Moon, draping the rocky body with its shadow in a total lunar eclipse.
The Moon may have appeared dim to us here on Earth, but it served as a giant lunar mirror from space.
On January 20-21, 2019, planet Earth came between the Sun and the Moon, draping the rocky body with its shadow in a total lunar eclipse.
The Moon may have appeared dim to us here on Earth, but it served as a giant lunar mirror from space.
Hubble was launched in 1990, and the space telescope has been roaming low Earth orbit ever since.
In order to observe Earth’s atmosphere, the telescope did not look directly at the planet but rather used the Moon to reflect sunlight that had passed through Earth’s atmosphere during the total lunar eclipse as the planet became wedged between the Moon and the Sun.
Astronomers have used this method before, but this is the first time a total lunar eclipse was captured in ultraviolet wavelengths, which is somewhere between visible light and X-rays, from a space telescope.
By doing so, the space telescope was able to detect the spectral fingerprint of ozone. Ozone is a gas made up of three oxygen atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, and serves as a protective shield from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation.
Ozone forms naturally when oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is exposed to strong concentrations of ultraviolet light, acting as a blanket around our planet.
“Photosynthesis might be the most productive metabolism that can evolve on any planet, because it is fueled by energy from starlight and uses cosmically abundant elements like water and carbon dioxide,” Giada Arney, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-author of the new study, said in a statement. “These necessary ingredients should be common on habitable planets.”
As scientists look for signs of life on other planets, ozone serves as a strong indication of habitability in other worlds.
“Finding ozone is significant because it is a photochemical byproduct of molecular oxygen, which is itself a byproduct of life,” Allison Youngblood, a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the new study said in a statement.
