A lot of the laws of physics I’ve studied, like Boyle’s Law and Charles’ Law, describe the behavior of “An ideal confined gas.”
I’ve had to tell several flight students to unlearn what they’ve learned about that in the meteorology chapter, because, for example, in a confined gas, increasing the temperature causes an increase in pressure while the density stays the same. In the Earth’s atmosphere, increasing temperature does nothing to the pressure and decreases the density. Because the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t “confined,” there’s no lid, the air is relatively free to change volume. Heat the entire planet up and the atmosphere will just get a little taller.
But, I think, even if we put a magical vacuum tight shell around the planet 200 miles up, making the volume finite, I think the atmosphere would still act like an unconfined gas, because 1. it’s so vast that it never homogenizes, parcels of different temperatures, pressures and moisture content take days to slosh across the available space, and 2. the Earth’s gravity will cause a pressure gradient; most of the air is at the bottom and if you heat it up, it may not change volume but the pressure at the top will increase.
So I guess there has to be an upper limit to the volume and/or mass of air that can be “confined” and it’s somewhere below planetary scale.
Ah the spherical cow problem. Idealized math isn’t always relevant to real world.
That said without doing anything special to earth the atmosphere is (theoretically) responsive. Gravity is a planets way of keeping atmospheric gases, as such it does at least partially confine them. The problem with trying to treat atmosphere as a confined gas is the scale of it which is why you have so many extra considerations mentioned. Even all the co2 we’ve released is only 0.0427% (427ppm) of atmospheric gases. If it didn’t cause a greenhouse effect we probably wouldn’t care.
neutron stars and black holes:
Well I mean, before you get that dense, what happens if you put Jupiter in a Jupiter-sized airtight box?
I would think putting Jupiter in a Jupiter size box would be a good experiment to see how much the sun affects the currents in Jupiters atmo. Like, you’re basically getting rid of sunlight as a confounding variable in studying the effects of the cores gravitational pull.
*assuming the Jupiter size box is massless xP
Would that massless box also be a perfect insulator? My understanding of thermodynamics breaks at “massless”. Assuming it’s a solid, sunlight would heat it, and that heat would be conducted to Jupiter, but again an object with a mass of zero breaks the math.
Is your massless box a better thermal insulator than the vacuum of space?
It is also my understanding that Jupiter, unique among our planets, radiates more heat into space from it’s own contraction than it receives from the Sun.
The ideal gas laws don’t deal with gravitation. The earth’s atmosphere behaves the way it does because of earth’s strong gravitational field (relative to the same volume of gas without earth).
It should also be noted that real gases are not ideal gases. Instead of being point particles, real gases can have asymmetric molecular shapes. This can lead to all kinds of funky effects as the particles bounce off one another and acquire both angular momentum and linear momentum.
