Scientists from the University of Copenhagen have announced that there is a class of reactive chemical compounds in the atmosphere called organic hydrotrioxides.. Although such compounds are short-lived, they may have effects that researchers are not yet aware of, reports Science alert..

The air we breathe is made up mostly of nitrogen, a large amount of oxygen and a small amount of carbon dioxide.. But there are a huge number of other elements in the atmosphere that scientists can only guess about.. According to researchers, while you were reading these lines, you breathed in several billion of these molecules..

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What has a direct impact on human health, not to mention the health of the entire planet, is literally hanging in the air.. Scientists Finding a New Ingredient in Earth's Atmosphere Means It's Worth Paying Attention to.

“These compounds have always existed – we just didn’t know about them.. But the fact that we now have evidence that compounds are formed and live for a certain period of time means that we can study their action... and respond if they turn out to be dangerous,” said chemist Henrik Grum Kj?rgaard from the University of Copenhagen in.

Very often in chemistry it happens that the addition of just one new component can completely change the behavior of a substance.. Let's take water as an example.. Thanks to the combination of two atoms of hydrogen and one - oxygen, a mysterious substance appeared, which is called life.. But if you add one more oxygen atom, you get hydrogen peroxide - a much more reactive compound that can tear the chemistry of life apart..

Attaching one more oxygen atom, you can get hydrotrioxide. Since hydroxides are highly reactive, it remains an open question whether they can form stable structures in the atmosphere..

And this question is dictated not just by academic interest.. So many processes in the work of our atmosphere, from how it affects human health to the scale of the global climate, depend on the interaction of various trace elements..

“Most of human activity results in the release of chemicals into the atmosphere. Therefore, knowing the reactions that determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere is important if we want to predict how our actions will affect the atmosphere in the future,” says Kristan H.. Moeller from the University of Copenhagen.

The team's research was the first direct observation of the formation of hydrotrioxide under atmospheric conditions from several substances known to be present in our air.. Scientists were able to study the way the compound is synthesized, how long it lasts and how it decomposes..

For example, isopropene can react to produce 10 million metric tons of hydroxide each year.. But this is only one of the sources of their appearance.. The team's calculations showed that virtually any compound could theoretically play a role in the formation of hydrotrioxides in the atmosphere, which would exist for minutes or hours..

During this time, they can participate in a variety of other reactions as powerful oxidizing agents, some of which may be hidden inside microscopic solid particles drifting in the wind..

Such particles can harm the health of the person who inhales them.. In addition, aerosols affect the ability of the Earth's atmosphere to reflect sunlight.. Knowledge of how internal chemistry causes them to increase or decrease in number could influence climate models.

Previously, scientists said that the climate crisis is harming the mental health of hundreds of millions of people around the world.. And mankind still has not appreciated the full scale of this threat..