If the moon is able to cause rising tides with its gravity, how come it cannot do the same with the atmosphere? Wouldn’t this cause the atmosphere to leak significantly?
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It probably does. No it would just cause tides.
Water droplets don’t just rise up and leave the earth, same for air.
Earth’s gravity is still overwhelmingly dominant, lunar pull isn’t enough to achieve escape velocity.
The point that gravity from the moon has a similar effect as gravity from the earth is about 80% of the way to the moon. This means that if something is 79% of the way to the moon and stationary, it will fall towards the earth.
Atmosphere is pretty much 1% to the moon or less (if you don’t count the exosphere, it’s only .2%). If any is escaping earth’s gravity, it’s not because of the moon.
It does also affect the atmosphere! But the moon is super duper far away, way to far to actually counteract the Earth’s own gravity, which is what would need to happen for the atmosphere to be pulled away. It just has enough to give it a little squeeze and create tides.
An object with greater mass has a greater gravitational pull, and the effects of gravity decrease dramatically with distance. The Earth is much larger than the moon, so it pulls much harder. And, the atmosphere is much closer to Earth than it is to the moon. So, the moon DOES pull on and deform the atmosphere (just as it does with the water in the oceans to create the tides), but the attraction to the Earth is far too strong for the moon to have any chance at pulling the atmosphere away.
The moon does cause atmospheric tides in the atmosphere, you just don’t notice it much for the same reason that creatures on the ocean floor generally don’t notice the tides.
The tides are not air and water being pulled towards the moon, but more being pulled down to the center of earth less in some places than others.
There are atmospheric tides, just like there are sea tides and land tides. They’re just not nearly big enough to allow any air, water, or land to escape.
You’ll notice that the tides don’t actually cause the water to leave the earth. The same is true for the atmosphere.
It does cause tides in the atmosphere, but a few meters don’t make a difference in an atmosphere that is tens of kilometers thick and doesn’t have a sharp upper edge (unlike the oceans).
The moon is big, but far away from the earth’s atmosphere.
The earth is bigger and much closer to its own atmosphere.
The moon’s gravity can pull the atmosphere a little, just like it pulls the oceans, but it can’t pull things off earth.
Just as when you jump and fall back to Earth so does the atmosphere. The gravity on Earth is acting more strongly on the atmosphere compared to the moon.
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