Taking advantage of a total lunar eclipse, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected ozone in Earth’s atmosphere. This method serves as a proxy for how they will observe Earth-like planets around other stars in the search for life.
This is the first time a total lunar eclipse was captured from a space telescope and the first time such an eclipse has been studied in ultraviolet wavelengths.
In a new study, Hubble did not look at Earth directly. Instead, astronomers used the Moon as a mirror that reflects the sunlight that has been filtered through Earth’s atmosphere.
Using a space telescope for eclipse observations is cleaner than ground-based studies because the data is not contaminated by looking through Earth’s atmosphere.
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