1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: When the earth loses atmosphere to space, where does it go?
If they are ionized particles, they can have two fates if they escape down Earth's magnetic field tail or out of the polar regions: they can either become part of the solar wind, in what are called "pickup ions", or, some fraction of them will return back down the tail, called "return flow". The solar wind forms what is called the heliosphere, which stretches far out into interstellar space. Given how big the heliosphere is, and how small solar system bodies are relative to it, it's most likely the ions from Earth will just remain in the solar wind, not interacting with anything else.
Fun fact about pickup ions, we can actually observe interstellar pickup ions! As the heliosphere moves through interstellar gases, these interstellar particles can become ionized. We can tell where they are from based on their energy distribution and direction. Zirnstein et al., 2022[1]is a bit technical but the introduction summarizes this. Sometimes the opposite happens, where ions become neutralized, but still have high energies. These are called energetic neutral atoms, and are nice because unlike ions they travel in straight lines, so we can basically treat them like photons and use them to make an "image" of a magnetosphere. We have done this for the heliosphere (cool figures in McComas et al., 2011),[2] but also for various planets, including Earth (IMAGE mission, for one), Mars (Mars Express, for example), Saturn (MIMI on Cassini), etc etc etc (it's a very common instrument type and useful space physics data). So this is also something that can happen to escaping particles.
1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-022-00895-2#Sec1
2: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011GL048763
Tl;dr they go out to space, where they just keep going.
There's nothing here!