Comments on: Everything bigger than 200 miles

By: icemith

icemith — Sun, 27 May 2007 07:33:57 +0000

Also I noticed that EARTH is King of the Rockies! Yeah, how ’bout that.

How does that factor into the equation re likely parameters for the existence of life?

Anywhere?

Ivan.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 27 May 2007 04:16:53 +0000

Hey Phil have you seen this video yet would make a nice front page video:
Stars and Planets in scale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r22t-A-eJ3k&mode=related&search=

By: llewelly

llewelly — Sat, 26 May 2007 20:41:17 +0000

And to hell with Pluto; where’s the lobby for Ganymede and Titan to be planets???

They’re very enthusiastic, and optimistic, but so far, Saturn and Jupiter have more pull …

By: icemith

icemith — Sat, 26 May 2007 18:34:30 +0000

Couldn’t help but notice that there is a certain few discontinuities in the size progression in the image, (which is absolutely a very telling piece of comparison if ever I saw anything).

Check out the size jump between Neptune and Earth; Venus and Mars; Callisto and Io; Europa and Triton; Pluto and 2005 FY9; 2002 TC302 and Ceres; 1995 SM55 and 2002 AW197. There seems to be a consistant size in each of the various “sections”, and a definite jump to the next section. With a large (enough ?) sample of Solar System bodies, I would have thought there would be a more even graduation in sizes. Are there some otherwise un-discovered bodies?

It has been postulated that various minor planets, even dwarf planets and large asteroids, are captured bodies from other areas of the Solar System, and I guess the jury is still out on most of them. But I does seem odd to me that there are some missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle.

Of course the asteroids *could* have been originally some of those bodies before they got hammered! Is it because I want everything to be nice and tidy?

I’ve saved it, but does anyone know if a higher res. version is available? If I can convince my printer to print out a “Banner”, then I will have a full width image which should be a terrific talking-point.

By my reckoning, it is equivalent to 16 A4 sheets (portrait mode), with about 15-20 mm borders at top and bottom. You could spring for a few more pages worth to have a full A4 height borderless. That would be 4.2 meters, about 14 feet long. Or go the whole hog and get those people who print Airport advertising signs to produce your mural!

Ivan.

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Sat, 26 May 2007 11:52:09 +0000

Interesting that although Uranus is 15 times earths mass, surface gravity is only .886 G. I’d only weigh 203 lbs there,,,
Neptune at 17 earh masses has a surface gravity of about 1.15 G. Density plays a big role in surface gravity.
Earth is a rocky planet with a very thin gaseous envelope. The gas giants are(more or less) the other way round,,,

GAry 7

By: Ronald Bumgarner

Ronald Bumgarner — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:55:58 +0000

I weigh 300 pounds and my wife tells me I am as big a round as a planet? Does that count?

By: Mark Martin

Mark Martin — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:01:13 +0000

“Ah, but they are approximately the same *mass* as the Earth, so some confusion can be blamed on that similarity.”

Uh- no they aren’t. Uranus is more massive than Earth by a factor of almost 15, and Neptune by a factor of over 17. I wouldn’t call that approximately the same.