Here’s a fun solar system trivia question you can use to amaze your friends, outwit your enemies, or embarrass your Natural Science teacher for not knowing.
For the purposes of this question, there are nine planets in our solar system. From largest to smallest (by volume), they are: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto. Now, lots of people know that the Sun is bigger than all the planets put together, but can any of the planets boast something similar? Is Jupiter bigger than all the other eight planets put together? Is Mars bigger than Mercury and Pluto put together? Which of the planets are bigger than all the smaller ones combined? The answer:All except Earth.
Well, hope you enjoyed this trivia question. As a bonus question, if you do it by mass instead of by volume, the ordering changes slightly - Neptune and Uranus are switched in the order. The answer also changes:Every planet, including Earth.
If in the future worhole technology becomes available and we are able to create portals up to ten meters in diamater that join two points in space, how long would it take one million such portals created with one terminal on the surface of Venus and the other on the surface of Mars to transfer enough atmosphere to give Mars a surafce pressure of one (Earth) atmosphere?
The proof is left to people with more computational skill than I, but intuitively I would say that the Martian gravity could not hold a thick enough atmosphere to generate a pressure equivalent to earth’s surface air pressure. Since the Martian gravity is weaker, it would take a higher column of air to generate the same pressure as Earth, and the Martian gravity would not be sufficient to keep the air molecules at the top of such a tall column from wandering off into space.
