eli5 How exactly does the atmosphere work? it

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Is it a force field like the glass dome in the Simpsons movie or the one surrounding Wakanda in Black Panther? Or is it just a region of gas? How does it hold itself together? Isn’t space a vaccum, so wouldn’t the atmosphere get sucked into space? Or is gravity strong enough to counter the vaccum of space?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It is exactly because of gravity. It’s also worth noting that the atmosphere never really “ends”; it just fades and fades and fades until at some point it’s so thin as to not be worth thinking about. But even up where geostationary satellites orbit, there are still gas particles getting pulled down towards the earth by gravity.

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