“This new planet, if you could imagine putting it in a cosmic water glass, it would float,” said Robert Noyes, a research astrophysicist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
And so now I cannot get the image of a “cosmic water glass” with a “fluffy PLANET” floating in it out of my mind.
what?!! this comment by this scientist is makign my head swell. it seems to large to even fit in my head! i’m imagining like, a swath of cotton candy in a large pint glass, just sitting there.
hahahaha I know – right???
Like … a planet could FLOAT????
“there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.”
I love stories like this because they are (a) just so freaky and (b) they are not stories about bad stuff going on in the world.
Hm…maybe I should make “floating islands” at dinner time tonight to celebrate this discovery. (“Floating islands” – a sort of meringue-y dumpling thing that you float on a sea of custard. It’s a dessert.)
Douglas Adams chuckles quietly in a corner of the celestial bar….
ricki – Bless you for that quote from Hamlet which is so so appropriate!!
OK, this just begs an old astrophysics joke. (I bet you didn’t know that there were old astrophysics jokes.)
The density of water is 1.0 g/cm^3. The mean density of Saturn is about 0.7 g/cm^3. So, if you had a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float.
But it would leave a ring.
ACK! Doug beat me to it by three minutes! LOL
hahahahahahaha I love it!
But it’s hard to imagine a ball of cotton candy so immense that its gravitational field would pull you in and keep tugging on you until you bounced off of the hard candy center at the core of the planet.
I dunno…for some people it seems like their beds develop that kind of gravitational pull just as the alarm goes off in the morning.
great B-movie title: “Escape from the Cotton Candy Planet”
I always was one of those annoying jump right out of bed people…
I am also an annoying jump right out of bed person. Apparently my alarm goes off for 10 minutes before I notice it – but once I’m up? I’m up.
Floating Saturn isn’t so easy. You’ll have to fill your tub up to about the 50,000 mile mark, and have gravity to keep the water in there, but the enormous pressure of that depth of water will turn most of it into exotic forms of high-density ice, with just a few thousand miles of water on top. When you plop Saturn in, it’ll sag like a water balloon under your laboratory’s gravity, and next you’ll see a lot of fizzing and bubbling and popping (slow, planetary size) as various reactions occur…Exploring all this so as to make an animation video would be a fun way to teach math and science, has anybody tried that? Felix