Rocky planets/moons tend to be Earth’s size or smaller. Venus is a few boulders smaller than Earth, Mars is about half the size, Mercury even smaller, Titan and Ganymede are larger though less dense than Mercury, etc. And us humans have experienced the Earth up close so we have a handle on how big rocky bodies are.
Then there’s Jupiter and Saturn, the big ones that have storms the size of our planet, that hit the ceiling for how big a “planet” can be because if you keep adding mass they only get denser, not bigger around, until they light up and become a
Stars are a whole other ball game. Here we start playing those “zoom way the hell out” videos where we start at something familiar and then “here’s how big the Sun is compared to that, then here’s Betelgeuse, and then UY Scuti or however you spell it, then we get into supermassive black holes…” These are truly brain bending.
But Uranus and Neptune are what? 3 or 4 times the radius of Earth? Uranus is to Earth as Earth is to the Moon? It fits in your head; given a solid surface and acceptable gravity a human could walk around it within a lifetime. The confronting thing about Uranus and Neptune aren’t their brain bending size, but the fact that they ARE comprehensible as real places.
Uranus and Neptune are a strange size.
Rocky planets/moons tend to be Earth’s size or smaller. Venus is a few boulders smaller than Earth, Mars is about half the size, Mercury even smaller, Titan and Ganymede are larger though less dense than Mercury, etc. And us humans have experienced the Earth up close so we have a handle on how big rocky bodies are.
Then there’s Jupiter and Saturn, the big ones that have storms the size of our planet, that hit the ceiling for how big a “planet” can be because if you keep adding mass they only get denser, not bigger around, until they light up and become a
Stars are a whole other ball game. Here we start playing those “zoom way the hell out” videos where we start at something familiar and then “here’s how big the Sun is compared to that, then here’s Betelgeuse, and then UY Scuti or however you spell it, then we get into supermassive black holes…” These are truly brain bending.
But Uranus and Neptune are what? 3 or 4 times the radius of Earth? Uranus is to Earth as Earth is to the Moon? It fits in your head; given a solid surface and acceptable gravity a human could walk around it within a lifetime. The confronting thing about Uranus and Neptune aren’t their brain bending size, but the fact that they ARE comprehensible as real places.
Ice giants are neat.