ELI5, why does hot air rise and have low pressure and cool air sink and has high pressure, if energy and temperature do not change the mass of an object?
In: 8
Imagine each air molecule is a bouncy ball.
If you bounce a bouncy ball hard (put more energy into it) it bounces further. Molecules that are hotter have more energy, so they bounce off each other more and therefore are further apart. Like a bouncy ball being higher off the floor the harder you throw it.
So the further apart the molecules are, the less dense the air is and the more space it takes up, meaning more pressure. Less dense things float on top of more dense things because gravity pulls more on denser objects.
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