"Unusually dense" exoplanet the size of Neptune observed

Originally published at: "Unusually dense" exoplanet the size of Neptune observed | Boing Boing

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Solid gold planet. :wink:

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Whatever it’s made of, we don’t want to go there. The gravity must be literally crushing at that size & density.

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Back To The Future Love GIF

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Does anybody know what the density of a neutron star is?

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A lot of sources give figures that are hopeless to imagine. Wikipedia for one states that one teaspoon of the matter would weigh as much as 900 Giza pyramids.
I took a different approach, asking “what if you could compress the Earth until it was as dense as a neutron star,” and came out with the size of any of humans’ largest buildings (such as the Giza pyramid)(someone please check my math).

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Pretty sure nothing could be as large or as dense as Uranus, though.

Ba dum bum… tss. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. :grin:

Earth is denser than Uranus though. It’s actually the most dense of any of the larger objects in the solar system. I’m afraid your joke should be about Uranus being relatively light for how big it is.

About 1000000000000000 g/cm3, so still 10000000000000 times more dense than this. There’s a lot of empty space in and between atoms you can squish out with enough pressure. Nothing made of normal matter really compares.

xkcd Exa-exabyte

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I.e. 114944114166.6667 adult badgers/cm3

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Ooooh. That makes sense. So about 1 petagram per cubic centimeter.

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“Unusually dense”

Planet shaming

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Wolfram Alpha’s surface gravity calculator gives it a gravity of 5.6 times Earth.
Survivable, in the very short term,but definitely crushing!

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Now you’re just getting silly.

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… daily activities would likely be curtailed as few of us could even stand up :thinking:

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Yup, weighing somewhere around half a ton would cause… difficulties.

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That’s where mobility scooters enter into it.

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Band Name!

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No discussion about planetary densities is complete without noting Saturn: at 0.7 g/cm³ it would float on water, theoretically.
That’s the 3rd best thing about Saturn. 2nd best is the rings of course. Very best thing? If you don’t already know you ought to be sitting down, Saturn's hexagon - Wikipedia

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As CCP Grey would say, Hexagons are the bestagons!

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