Planet Sizes

[Fr8monkey]

I just learned today that if you lined up all the planets side to side, they would all fit inside the distance from the Earth to the Moon... With room for Pluto for all for all the Pluto believers.

[The Destroyer]

Yeah, pretty mind-blowing.

[Superfluous J]

Space, they say, is big.

[dharak1]

This actually made me realize planets are much bigger than I thought. Whats the radius of Jupiter again?

[Fr8monkey]

Whats the radius of Jupiter again?

43,441 miles (69,911 km) over 11x the Earth diameter... That is 1,321 times Earth’s volume.

Edited October 27, 2014 by Fr8monkey

[Vastronaut]

Hmm thanks for sharing. Didn't realize. About the moon, compared to Earth mass:

[AbortButton]

Mind=blown

Seriously though, that's actually really cool. I never knew that.

[Camacha]

This actually made me realize planets are much bigger than I thought. Whats the radius of Jupiter again?

I would have thought there would be more room to spare too. On the other hand, you would have most of the non-solar matter in the system there. Adding the smaller/dwarf planets and floaty rocks makes little difference. The rest is just nothing. Space. Empty.

[Fr8monkey]

Another good one... Europa (Jupiter's moon) has more water on it than the Earth does:

[Camacha]

It always gets me how little water there is, and how well distributed that is to create those vast, world spanning oceans.

[Fr8monkey]

Kind of funny all those 'alien invasion' movies of them coming to take out resources when there is more in other places... and you don't have to fight for it!

John S. Lewis, author of the space mining book Mining the Sky, has said that an asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would have a mass of about two billion tons. There are perhaps one million asteroids of this size in the solar system. One of these asteroids, according to Lewis, would contain 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of metal cobalt and 7,500 tons of platinum. The platinum alone would have a value of more than $150 billion!

[Fr8monkey]