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All 7 planets could fit between Earth and the Moon
- pyeri 3y agoBut at such a congested space between them, chances are that gravity or magnetic fields on them will cause some havoc or the other.
- spaulmark 3y agoAgreed, hopefully no one does this.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoSurf would be way, way up though
- SllX 3y agoYou're such a kidder. Nobody would be that dastardly.
- TNorthover 3y agoI’ve put a warning sign over the big red button so we should be fine.
- PlunderBunny 3y agoOops - too late.
- Ekaros 3y agoYou have to admit it would be one of the coolest ways to go...
- andrewstuart 3y agoAre you saying someone might?
- avgcorrection 3y agosigh Someone is going to make their own Occupy The Earth–Moon Distance t-shirts now.
- beardyw 3y agoI think gravity would turn the whole earth into a sea of lava, or worse!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 3y agoSuper Jupiter soup. If it could pull in the asteroid belt too, who knows maybe start a red dwarf binary star system. Would be one hell of a ride in any case.
- qbrass 3y agoThe sun contains 99.86% of the solar system's mass. Jupiter contains .2%. The other gas giants make up the rest, and everything else combined rounds down to zero. You could dump everything from Mercury to the Oort cloud into Jupiter and it's still not enough mass to turn it into a star.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoI’ve heard that but would like to see for myself. Don’t forget about dark matter.
- tracker1 3y agoLet's hope God doesn't decide to play with their marbles.
- jbverschoor 3y agoI'm confused.. I always thought the big planets were a lot lot larger than earth
- disillusioned 3y agoAnd... indeed they are. But the diameters of each of the other planets combined are less than the average distance between the Earth and the Moon: Average distance from Earth to the Moon: Approximately 384,400 kilometers. Diameters of the other planets: Mercury: 4,880 kilometers Venus: 12,104 kilometers Mars: 6,779 kilometers Jupiter: 139,820 kilometers Saturn: 116,460 kilometers Uranus: 50,724 kilometers Neptune: 49,244 kilometers For a total of 380,011 km, so 4,000 km to spare!
- emayljames 3y agoDoes this account for most measurements being from the center of earth to center of moon? So needs both max surface levels subtracted.
- dkpk 3y agoGood point. The image doesn’t mention but the calculations do subtract radii of both Earth and the Moon.
- sph 3y agoCheck the picture in the post. I'm pretty sure it is to scale. They are much larger, but the moon is much further away from Earth than you imagined.
- jbverschoor 3y agoThe thing is that it doesn't look to scale to me. But that's probably because most other visualizations/models are not right. Especially in the distances. I checked some other images and while the planets seem to scale, my brain multiplies the size of the planets with the distance ratio.
- asimpleusecase 3y agoThat is really cool. I will save that image.
- thinkingemote 3y agoGiven that the moon-earth distance varies, these planets would, twice a month at around the half moon, fit in exactly with no space left over It varies between 360000km and 405000km ish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance
- NKosmatos 3y agoSumming up the diameters of all planets (except earth) is 380018 km, which is between the range for the lunar distance. The average lunar distance is 384399 km. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/solar-system-sizes/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/solar-system-sizes/ The lunar distance from the Wikipedia entry is from center of earth to center of moon, so if we want to be more precise we would need to subtract the radius of both earth (6371 km) and moon (1737 km), in order to find the distance between their surfaces. So on average we have: distance from surface of earth to the moon = average lunar distance earth radius - lunar radius = 384399 - 6371 - 1737 = 376291 km Which means that putting all the planets side by side, starting from the surface of the earth, we could fit them but not on an average day, we’d need the moon to be a bit above the average distance :-)
- dkpk 3y agoThis is true. At it’s closest distance (perigee), it would become crammed.
- r0b05 3y agoThis is mind blowing. Who would have thought the Moon was so far away?
- userbinator 3y agoAlternatively, this shows just how far the planets actually are from each other, relative to their diameters. Look for articles about "scale model of solar system" for some more interesting reading, e.g.: https://www2.tntech.edu/leap/astr1010/sssm.html https://www2.tntech.edu/leap/astr1010/sssm.html
- dkpk 3y agoThis is really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
- masklinn 3y agohttps://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... is a hilarious linear scale model of the solar system (scale is that the moon is 1px). Do be warned that for some people scale model of such scales trigger existential dread.
- froh 3y agosome places also offer interplanetary hikes to scale this one is 1:310^9, and it has feel-the-gravity weights for the planets, too: https://sfeu.de/planetenweg/index.html https://sfeu.de/planetenweg/index.html what I personally found mind blowing was insight into earth at scale. if you go for 1mm==10km then earth has 4m equatorial circumference, 1.28m diameter. bat that scale, Mt Everest is .8mm, the Mariana trench is 1.1mm and the distance from Nuremberg where I live to Erlangen "next door" is 1.6mm, and Germany is the size of my hand, and.big enough to have visible curvature. the outer 60km, that is 6mm at this scale, are solid, then it's dough, some places even pudding or outright liquid. the crust is* an eggshell, swimming on the inside of earth. breathable atmosphere is just a teensy thin .5mm layer, overall it's 2mm. such a model should be in every school, to me it's a deeply humbling experience, reminding me of the fragility of our habitat.
- Aardwolf 3y ago"With about 8030 km or 4990 miles to spare" So pluto could easily fit as well
- tetris11 3y agoAccording to Wolfram alpha, you could put in another Earth and two more Mercury's and still have 1600km leftover. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28earth+to+moon+distance%29+-+%28%283*diameter+of+mercury%29+%2B+diameter+of+venus+%2B+diameter+of+earth+%2B+diameter+of+mars+%2B+diameter+of+jupiter+%2B+diameter+of+saturn+%2B+diameter+of+uranus+%2B+diameter+of+neptune%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28earth+to+moon+distan...
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt's a long way to the Moon.
- freddealmeida 3y ago[flagged]
- zapnuk 3y ago[flagged]
- dwroberts 3y agoThis is one of those things that seems incredible at first, but when you think about it, isn't actually that strange at all: Yes, some of these planets are massive, but the problem has always been (in observing or visiting them) their vast distance from Earth, not their actual sizes.
- em-bee 3y agowhat makes it incredible is not the fact itself but the visualization and the realization of it. i wasn't aware of the fact, and even though after thinking about it it's kind of obvious, the visualization really helps to let the fact sink in and make it memorable.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoI'm pretty sure I've seen an infographic of this maybe a decade or more ago, but it was also a fact on No Such Thing As A Fish (the QI elves podcast) recently. I wonder if the Reddit poster picked it up from them. https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/pdst.fm/e/arttrk.com/p/ABMA5/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/audioboom.com/posts/8428369.mp3?modified=1704994321&sid=2399216&source=rss https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/pdst.fm/e/arttrk.com/p/ABMA5/dts.podt... - "513: No Such Thing As Upside-Down Space Rain", 4m36 Shout out to AntennaPod, installed from F-Droid app store; far-and-away the best podcast listening app I've found.
- cornstalks 3y ago> I'm pretty sure I've seen an infographic of this maybe a decade or more ago The Reddit post is from 9 years ago so this checks out.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoLol, clearly I missed that, thanks for the info.
- Max-Ganz-II 3y agoThis is not quite what it seems. What happens as you pile mass into a planet is that the planet becomes dense, not large, and this is because of gravity. Jupiter has more than twice the mass of Saturn, but is only moderately larger in diameter. You can keep dumping mass into a planet, and it just won't get much bigger, until you have enough mass that fusion kicks off, and then suddenly the now-a-star inflates, because it becomes extremely hot and then you have something the size of the Sun.
- littlestymaar 3y ago> What happens as you pile mass into a planet is that the planet becomes dense, not large, and this is because of gravity. It's more complexe than this. Yes Jupiter is twice as dense as Saturn, but so is Uranus, which is much smaller. Also the main reason for why Jupiter is just moderately larger than Saturn is that, at equal density, mass goes as the cube of diameter. If Jupiter had a density as low as Saturn, its diameter would only be 26% higher than it is today, and just 50% bigger than Saturn despite being 3.3 times as heavy.
- Aardwolf 3y agoSo it's including the atmosphere in the radii of those planets (apparently one counts the atmosphere up to minimum 1 bar as part of the radius for gas giants). Do we even know what's inside the gas giants, how big is the rocky core inside (if any)? Having probes dive inside of the gas giants for exploration would be an awesome space mission!
- zansara 3y ago> Having probes dive inside of the gas giants for exploration would be an awesome space mission! The Galileo mission to Jupiter carried a probe which dived into the atmosphere: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]