http://kokogiak.com/solarsystembodie...n200miles.html

WARNING: This brings up a gihumongous image.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Hi, Great picture, makes a great poster.
Thanks, Dan

Not unlike topic Solar system bodies arranged from large to small.

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Nice pic. I'm always surprised by just how many huge planet-sized objects there are in the Kuiper belt.

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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

I was a little stunned. I hadn't seen Miranda side by side like that with the other major moons of Uranus. Its kinda dinky.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Somehow I was picturing Triton as a little larger too. It was also interesting just how many main-belt asteroids were in the picture (four that I counted). I thought there were more in the 200 mile plus size range.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Triton got me too, but I figured Voyager 2 put that to rest with more precise measurements. For the longest time, I thought Titan and Triton were the largest moons, that's definitely been laid to rest...

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Well, at one time it was widely believed that Triton was the largest satellite in the Solar System...

Many of the KBOs have very uncertain diameter values. Orcus is probably only 1000 km in diameter (what's up with KBOs? Almost all of them have "shrinked" a lot since their discovery, most notably Pluto.)

It is hard to comprehend how tiny Mimas actually is. It is hardly large enough to be included in the list.

Enceladus is currently volcanically active, whereas Miranda and Vesta were active in the past. All of them are among the smallest.

One nitpick: dwarf planets are listed as "planet (dwarf)" which gives the impression they're planets of dwarf variety, which isn't true.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Pluto != Planet!



I never new Pluto had a moon though. It's so tiny I could probably run around it in a day. If I was wearing a lava suit.

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With a diameter of 1200km, you'd have to run really fast

Actually, Pluto has a gigantic moon.
Charon is the largest moon in the solar system compared to the planet it revolves around, even larger that our moon.

If it got enough sunlight to see it, it would look absolutely massive on the sky, with a diameter more than 6½ times that of our moon and an area more than 40 times our moon.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Actually it has (at least) 3. The other 2 were found a few years ago and are much smaller than Charon. (But bigger than I thought, wikipedia gives 137+- 11km and 160 +- 10km as an upper bound for their diameter)

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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

I assume you meant apparent diameter, as the Moon has almost 3x the diameter as Charon.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

I actually had "apparent" in there while writing and removed it since I felt it implied by talking about how it would look

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Oh Wow.
That is really awesome.

That "Io" Moon looks likes a fruit to me.

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Jean
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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein

"The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge " - Bertrand Russell

Sic transit gloria mundi...

Two recent MPECs (MPEC 2007-R02 and MPEC 2007-R03) list several new large KBOs discovered by Mike Brown's team. Based on the absolute magnitude, many of them should be listed in the image. The smallest trans-Neptunian object in the image, 2006 HH123, has absolute magnitude H = 5.2. Brightest of the new objects, 2005 QU₁₈₂, has the same absolute magnitude as 20000 Varuna (H = 3.7). If the object has much darker surface, it could be much larger than Varuna (~500 km). When Varuna was discovered, it was big news (well, it was believed to be larger than 1000 km in diameter). Now nobody notices such rubble...

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Actually, it IS true that "dwarf planets" are planets of the dwarf variety. That is the only way the term can possibly make linguistic sense. It's good to know that not everyone is accepting the controversial (and in the views of many, ridiculous) IAU determination that a "dwarf planet" is not a planet at all.

For decades, Pluto was thought to be bigger than it actually is because no one knew that it had a large moon located in very close proximity. Until James Christy discovered Charon, which is half the size of Pluto, in 1978, no one realized that when they looked at Pluto, they were actually looking at TWO separate objects.

Oh please don't make this another "Pluto is a planet" thread.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

I like the web-page--along with the star comparison chart.