I just can’t compute how this is possible. How can a telescope detect a gas, which isn’t even visible to the naked eye, on a planet that is an incomprehensible distance away.
[Source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66786611)
In: 143
An actual ELI5 answer:
Remember the pretty colors a prism makes? Like a rainbow? If you hold a magnifying glass up to the rainbow you will see dark lines, like a barcode! When light passed through these gasses, like Oxygen, dark lines form in the rainbow. Different gasses have different barcodes! We can read these barcodes to tell what types of gasses are on other planets!
Our telescope can see distant light, put it through a prism and then read the barcode to tell what gasses that light passed through!
Obviously much more complicated than that but you’re 5 years old..now go outside and find some frogs or something.
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