atmospheric chemistry

Deep inside a sub-Neptune, where pressures reach a hundred thousand bars and temperatures hit four thousand degrees, rock behaves like boiling soup. Heavy vapors of silicon and magnesium rise, cool, and fall back as a rain of solid particles.

In a pot of boiling soup, light fat droplets rise to the top, while heavy vegetable chunks sink to the bottom. Particles in the tenuous hot gas around the Sun and other stars behave much the same way — except instead of broth, there's a mixture of charged particles: electrons, protons, and alpha particles.

Meteorologists have grown used to trusting neural networks: the GraphCast model predicts Earth's weather days ahead by drawing on global snapshots of the atmosphere. But this 'brain' can be transplanted to another planet — where the air is thin and the Sun warms differently.

A planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee of life. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, a star dictates the tempo and character of planetary atmosphere evolution over billions of years.

When the JWST telescope breaks the light of a distant exoplanet into a spectrum, it reads a chemical chronicle. But this chronicle is not a monolithic truth; it's an atmosphere constantly rewritten by the star's radiation.

A translator in a conference hall tries to convey the speaker's words, but the hall is noisy: someone coughs, chairs creak, and the street outside is loud. If the speaker lowers their voice, the translator still keeps translating, but their voice drowns in the noise.

In the orchestra of interstellar life search, every note counts. And the score here is dictated not by man, but by a distant star. For the planet TRAPPIST-1 e, one of seven in the system of an ultracool red dwarf, the conductor's baton is harsh ultraviolet light.

A kindergarten where some kids are busy making sandcastles while others are already assembling building blocks. That's roughly what the V1298 Tau system looks like: it's only 20 million years old — by cosmic standards, it just left the nursery. Several planets orbit it, and two of them, b and e, turned out to be surprisingly different.

A pot of boiling lava, sealed with a thick lid of gas. That's roughly what sub-Neptunes look like — planets that are common around other stars but absent in our own solar system. Beneath a thick hydrogen atmosphere sloshes a molten magma ocean.

A giant cloud of gas and dust, so cold that its warmth barely flickers, just a few degrees above absolute zero. This is TMC-1 in the constellation Taurus, one of the darkest and densest cradles of molecules in our Galaxy. In recent years, it has become a true treasure trove for astrochemists: the number of substances found there has more than doubled.

The smell of fresh bread unmistakably signals a nearby bakery. But to know if baking is happening right now, it's better to catch not the aroma itself but its intensification — the continuous stream of hot air from the oven. This everyday analogy helps grasp a revolution in the search for extraterrestrial life on exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system.

A ball rolls up a hill, but it doesn't have enough energy, so it rolls back down. That's classical mechanics for you. But in the quantum world, a tiny particle can sometimes pass right through the hill, as if the barrier weren't there. This trick, tunneling, is business as usual for a light atom like hydrogen.

A neutron star is the remnant of an exploded star, compressed to the size of a city. On its surface, a thermonuclear fire sometimes erupts: accumulated gas explodes like a giant hydrogen bomb. After the burst, ash remains — a mixture of heavy elements that rises to the surface and forms a hot atmosphere.

Mars is an icy desert with an average temperature of minus 60. To warm it without biology, scientists propose three approaches with a single idea: create a thick heat-trapping blanket. First, deploy transparent film-blankets over bases. They let sunlight in but keep heat from escaping, allowing us to harvest water from the soil and grow plants.

Today's Martian surface is a cold, nearly airless home. Many dream of a full renovation: warming the planet, filling it with air from carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

In a dark, cold cloud between the stars, a dust grain a thousandth of a millimeter across catches light molecules. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen stick to its surface like raindrops to glass and react. After a few steps, methanol is produced — the same alcohol found in windshield washer fluid.

Cometary ice slams into the young Earth. The pressure at the impact point is like stacking six aircraft carriers on your thumbnail. In the lab, such conditions are reproduced by squeezing a tiny sample between two rotating anvils. This time, adenosine monophosphate — one of the letters of future RNA — was placed under the anvils.

An ordinary octane molecule is a chain of eight carbon atoms, like a flexible wire. On a hot platinum surface (above 600 K), it doesn't just lie still: it starts to squirm. First, the chain bends so that its ends come closer together.

In the air we breathe, invisible chemical events are constantly unfolding. One of them is the birth and instant death of a particle with the formula H₂COO. Known as an 'intermediate,' it appears for a split second when ozone molecules collide with organic compounds, then immediately shatters into simpler fragments.

A rocky planet around another star is like a dish in an oven. The star sets the temperature: the farther away, the colder.

In every leaf, in the light, a factory works that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen goes into the air we breathe, and the plant uses the hydrogen for food. The heart of this factory is a protein complex with four manganese atoms and one calcium atom.

Many planets around other stars — exoplanets — have elongated orbits. With each close approach, the star’s gravity squeezes and stretches them, like kneading dough. Friction heats up the interior to the point where rock melts, creating underground oceans of magma.

For 36 days, tropical cyclone Freddy raged over the Indian Ocean, the longest-lived cyclone on record. Meteorologists tracked it from satellites, aircraft, and ground stations. But one detail eluded all instruments: the precise air density deep within the vortex. And that density determines where the cyclone will turn tomorrow.

In the vast concert hall of the atmosphere, ozone plays a part that changes from tier to tier. Near the surface, its notes sound alarming, for there it is a pollutant that irritates lungs and leaves. At 25 kilometers up, the same gas becomes a protective shield that absorbs harsh ultraviolet radiation.

Soil breathes. The top layer of the earth takes in moisture after rain, then releases it into the air, much like lungs inhale and exhale. This inhalation and exhalation happens everywhere on the planet, but its rhythm is not uniform: in some places it is fast and steady, in others irregular and deep.