Matthew Kenworthy is an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands who specializes in discovering exoplanets through direct imaging — observing light directly from an exoplanet rather than detecting a world from its affects on its star.
Sodium atoms make up a minuscule fraction of our atmosphere, but they make up a big part of airglow, and have a very unusual origin —You can see shooting stars on any clear dark night, if you’re willing to wait. They are teensy tiny meteors, produced by grains of dust heating up and vaporizing in the upper atmosphere as they travel at over 7 miles per second.
As shooting stars blaze across the sky, at roughly 60 miles altitude, they leave behind a trail of atoms and molecules. Sometimes you can see shooting stars with distinct colors, resulting from the atoms and molecules they contain. Very bright shooting stars can even leave visible smoke trails. And among those atoms and molecules is a smattering of sodium.This high layer of sodium atoms is actually useful to astronomers.
This technique — called"adaptive optics" — is powerful, but there's a big problem. There are not enough natural bright stars for adaptive optics to work over the whole sky. So astronomers make their own artificial stars in the night sky, called"laser guide stars." Those sodium atoms are high above the turbulent atmosphere, and we can make them glow brightly by firing a power laser at them tuned to the distinct yellow of sodium. The resulting artificial star can then be used for adaptive optics. The shooting star you see at night helps us see the universe with sharper vision.
So the sky isn't blue, at least not always. It is a glow-in-the-dark night sky too, colored a mix of green, yellow and red. Its colors result from scattered sunlight, oxygen, and sodium from shooting stars. And with a little bit of physics, and some big lasers, we can make artificial yellow stars to get sharp images of our cosmos.
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