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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Picture the moon as a toddler and the earth as a pro wrestler, and they’re playing tug-of-war, with the rope being the atmosphere. The moon is pulling on the air, but it isn’t strong enough to take it from the earth.
Also gravity is a two-way MUTUAL force. To be very strongly affected by the massive moon you also need to be very massive. The atmosphere is 1/270th the mass of the ocean. See also: you can jump up and down just fine, but the huge moon is stuck in orbit.
Because the Earth is more massive.
To flip your question around, if the moon could pull away some air, why wouldn’t the more massive Earth pull it right back?
Think about it like a bucket. The water/atmosphere on earth is like a bucket the atmosphere is on top of the water. The moon is like a magnet that can attract the water and atmosphere. It can slosh around the stuff inside the bucket by moving around. But that sloshing isn’t enough to make anything leave the bucket.
It does the same thing to air that it does to oceans. You just don’t notice it because the change is so minuscule. Also air is subject to the variability of weather patterns much more so than water.
It does pull the atmosphere, pretty much in the same way as the tides.
As for why it doesn’t “leak”, well the earth is bigger and closer, so it pulls a lot harder.
It does pull the atmosphere, pretty much in the same way as the tides.
As for why it doesn’t “leak”, well the earth is bigger and closer, so it pulls a lot harder.
The moon doesn’t actually orbit earth in thr sense one would think.
Both earth and the moon orbits their mutual barycenter.
This point is – because earth is alot bigger than the moon) inside earth. But not exactly at its center.
For this reason earth’s rotation wobbles a bit.
This is what’s causing the tides.
Its not the moon pulling at our atmosphere.
Here’s an animation that makes it easier to visualize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_(astronomy)#/media/File%3AOrbit3.gif
So the answer to your question is that the moon isn’t pulling away the atmosphere because the atmosphere is much more attracted to earth than to the moon.
If a big strong person plays a tug of war with a little weak person the rope moves in the direction of the strong person
The earth is the strong person, the moon is the weak person the atmosphere is the rope. The earth pulls harder
The moon does not cause tides by lifting the ocean up; the moon causes tides by squeezing the Earth into a football shape (that’s why we have two high tides per day: there are two points on the football).
The atmosphere is also squeezed into a football shape, and so there are atmospheric tides as well.
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