What makes a planet have an atmosphere?

What makes a planet have an atmosphere?

A: Planets and their atmospheres come from the same material as their parent star, which forms from a nebula of dust and gas. After the new sun ignites, excess material that didn’t make it into the star instead forms a disk around it. Planets, asteroids, and comets later condense from that disk.

How big does a planet have to be to have an atmosphere?

Small planets and moons have insufficient gravity to hold an atmosphere. The gas molecules escape to space, leaving the planet or moon without an insulating blanket or a protective shield. Earth & Venus are the right size to hold a sufficient-sized atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is about 100 miles thick.

Do all planets have atmosphere?

For starters, it should be noted that every planet in the Solar System has an atmosphere of one kind or another. And these range from incredibly thin and tenuous (such as Mercury’s “exosphere”) to the incredibly dense and powerful – which is the case for all of the gas giants.

What is required for an atmosphere?

Three factors play into a gas’s ability to escape the pull of a planet’s gravity: temperature, molecular mass, and escape velocity, the speed a molecule needs to achieve to escape into space.

What two factors influence whether gas particles stay or leave a planets atmosphere?

The effects of gravity and temperature work opposite to each other. A higher temperature tries to dissipate an atmosphere while higher gravity tries to retain an atmosphere. If the particle’s average speed is close to the escape velocity, then those type of gas particles will not remain for billions of years.

What factors affect a planet’s temperature?

On global scales, three things can affect this energy flow and therefore, the average global surface temperature. As shown in the figure below, they are the planet’s distance from the Sun, the planet’s surface reflectivity (albedo), and the planet’s atmosphere (through a process called the greenhouse effect).

What planet does not have an atmosphere?

Mercury
Mercury is the only planet without any kind of atmosphere. It does, however, have an exosphere, which is made up of gases that are absorbed from the solar wind and emitted from the planet’s surface. Hydrogen, Helium, and Oxygen are among the pollutants. Venus has a dense, hot atmosphere made mostly of carbon dioxide.

Which planets have the most atmosphere?

Most of the planets in our solar system have two or three constituents that make up most of the atmosphere. For example, Venus and Mars have more than 98% of their atmosphere in carbon dioxide and nitrogen, while Earth has 99% of its atmosphere in nitrogen and oxygen.

What conditions must be present for a planet to develop and hold onto an atmosphere?

To develop and hold onto an atmosphere a planet must have sufficient mass so that its gravitational attraction holds onto gas molecules, the velocity of gas molecules must be less than the escape velocity from a planet’s gravitational field, and temperature must be cool enough so that the velocity of gas molecules is …

What force determines the motions of planets and other objects in the solar system?

The Sun’s gravity pulls the planets in orbit around it, and some planets pull moons in orbit around them. Even spacecraft are in motion through the solar system, either in orbit around the Earth or Moon, or traveling to further worlds, because of gravitational forces.

What is the main factor when determining atmospheric temperature of a planet?

What are the factors that make up the weather?

Weather is made up of multiple parameters, including air temperature, atmospheric (barometric) pressure, humidity, precipitation, solar radiation and wind. Each of these factors can be measured to define typical weather patterns and to determine the quality of local atmospheric conditions.

How does the atmosphere affect the weather system?

High in the atmosphere, narrow bands of strong wind, such as the jet streams, steer weather systems and transfer heat and moisture around the globe. As they travel across the Earth, air masses and global winds do not move in straight lines.

What makes up the state of the atmosphere?

Weather and Atmosphere. As a basic definition, weather is the state of the atmosphere. Most weather occurs in the troposphere, or the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Weather is made up of multiple parameters, including air temperature, atmospheric (barometric) pressure, humidity, precipitation, solar radiation and wind.

Which is a factor that determines whether a planet has an atmosphere?

There are two main factors that determine whether a planet can develop and keep an atmopshere and they are the escape velocity of the planet (how fast the object has to go to escape the gravitational pull) and the speed of the molecules in the atmosphere. For example the escape velocity for earth is about 11km/s (25,ooomph)