from Hacker News

All 7 planets could fit between Earth and the Moon

by dkpk on 1/27/24, 7:07 AM with 62 comments

• by thinkingemote on 1/27/24, 8:21 AM

  Given 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

• by pbhjpbhj on 1/27/24, 10:47 AM

  I'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.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.

• by Max-Ganz-II on 1/27/24, 11:03 AM

  This 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.

• by Aardwolf on 1/27/24, 8:35 AM

  "With about 8030 km or 4990 miles to spare"

  So pluto could easily fit as well

• by r0b05 on 1/27/24, 8:26 AM

  This is mind blowing. Who would have thought the Moon was so far away?

• by dwroberts on 1/27/24, 10:33 AM

  This 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.

• by jbverschoor on 1/27/24, 8:02 AM

  I'm confused.. I always thought the big planets were a lot lot larger than earth

• by asimpleusecase on 1/27/24, 8:03 AM

  That is really cool. I will save that image.

• by andrewstuart on 1/27/24, 9:37 AM

  It's a long way to the Moon.

• by pyeri on 1/27/24, 7:12 AM

  But at such a congested space between them, chances are that gravity or magnetic fields on them will cause some havoc or the other.