Someone will have to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure it would. But keep in mind there’s a limit to how much you can compress it before it becomes a liquid or a supercritical fluid.
Thank you both. Ignorance fought.
The gas giants - what we see is opaque gas.
Nothing is truly “clear” except, well, nothing.
I’m unaware of any “metal” that in it’s solid form can be manipulated into becoming “clear” by being thin. At the point it would be “clear” it would have holes.
The air around us is not clear. There’s just no vantage point that looks through enough of it to make it opaque. A sunset is a start, you’re looking through enough atmosphere to filter out the blue light. At 5-6 times that distance you’d filter out most of the light.
Even outer space is opaque given enough distance. If it weren’t all those stars in the sky would light up the Earth 24x7.
But if the OP is taken as - is there any gas that is Opaque at a thickness of 1 meter, then the answer is no - gas is simply not that dense.
Likewise a solid is never that spread out. - But there are plenty of solids that are translucent at 1 meter. None are perfectly clear.
Why should you be? That’s glowing exhaust gasses.
Radon is a very dense gas-is it noticeably opaque?
No, radon is colorless
Just because a gas is dense doesn’t mean it will be opaque, or colored. Sulfur hexafluoride is pretty damned dense, but completely clear.
I’m sure you didn’t mean “completely clear”
Unless you’re certain I could see through a planet made of this stuff.
Chlorine gas in sufficient density or quantity is most certainly opaque. I think that the OP ought to define what he means by opaque. Is 1m thickness sufficient? 1 cm? 1mm?
Quoth pan1:
Folks upthread have already mentioned that the astronauts’ helmets were covered with gold on the moon landings, and they could still see through them.
You’re referring to Olber’s paradox, but opacity can’t resolve the problem. If there were something between us and the stars that were absorbing the light, then the absorbing material would just heat up to the same temperature as the stars, and we’d be left with the same problem. The real reason the entire sky isn’t star-bright is that the Universe has a finite age.
Quoth ralph124c:
Most absorbtion is due to the bonds between atoms, of which radon (being a noble gas) has none. With a monatomic gas, all you’ll get is transitions between well-defined energy states of the electrons within the atom, which will lead to absorbtion only in very sharp, narrow spectral lines. The only reason radon is dense is that it has a very big nucleus, but it’s the electrons, not the nucleus, that do the absorbing (at least, until you get up into the gamma-ray range).
It’s no accident that that colored gases are uncommon. Visible absorption is from very low energy electronic transitions. There may be another way to get visible absorption, but I can’t think of it off hand. I can only think of two ways to get visible absorption from a compound.
Metal to ligand transitions are one method. Metals have large d orbitals that can be pretty close in energy. Slight changes in symmetry can create very close transitions. Most metals are not gases because they are heavy. The metal carbonyls aren’t really gases, but they do have high vapor pressures. You could never get them concentrated enough at STP because they would precipitate out.
The other method would be long conjugated systems. Similar to the standard “particle in a box” problem, the larger the system, the lower the energy of the transition. In addition to conjugation, you need to have heteroatoms that push and pull electrons. Large molecules with polar groups are going to have very high boiling points.
It’s quite easy to observe. Look just above the spout of a boiling kettle: you will see nothing. It’s pure steam. Above that, the steam starts to condense and it looks white.
A 1 m layer of air weighs a kilogram per square meter, which is many times what aluminum foil weighs.
Why would someone want opaque glasses??? You wouldn’t be able to see anything.
Ohhhh, opaque gasses… nevermind
Quick question, does the opacity of a gas depend on its pressure in a measurable way? I would think that with more molecules per unit of volume, the number of things light can hit on its way through the medium would increase and with it so would the absorbance at whatever wavelength that particular gas is fond of. If that is the case, then any gas could become considerably more opaque as it is compressed.
Such things make me question what the atmosphere of venus or jupiter must look like to the human eye. Before it melts, or is crushed under its own weight, respectively.
If it’s an ideal gas*, doubling the pressure will double the optical density. Most gases aren’t ideal, so the relation between pressure and opacity is more complicated.