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I thought there was no way this could be true - I was at the Griffith Observatory yesterday and saw that Venus was nearly 80% the mass of Earth. But indeed, Ma
by dfee 9y ago
I thought there was no way this could be true - I was at the Griffith Observatory yesterday and saw that Venus was nearly 80% the mass of Earth.
But indeed, Mars has only about 1/10 the mass of Earth! And Mercury is about half of that.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/ https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/
- mirimir 9y agoIt's the mass ~ size cubed that's deceptive.
- kijin 9y agoYeah, Earth is huge! It also has the highest density of all the planets, thanks to the iron and nickel in the core. Earth is so dense that its surface gravity is higher than that of Saturn and Uranus (for a suitable definition of "surface" for the gas giants) despite the fact that the latter are much more massive as a whole. We should make note of these facts and use them to burn the aliens if we ever come to an interplanetary rap battle :)
- stephengillie 9y agoIt's as though Earth were a gas giant, but with the outer layers of hydrogen and helium blown away. The magnetosphere is closer in magnitude to Uranus's or Neptune's than Venus's or Mars's. We think it's why we still have water.
- zentiggr 9y agoThat makes me wonder - given that Jupiter and Saturn are so massive as to have solid cores, how do their core sizes compare to Earth's size? never compared those numbers, not sure where to find core size estimates for our four giants.