Sun No Longer Largest Object in Solar System

[matt_mcl]

@OtakuLoki

Well, since that’s what most nebulae are: dust clouds bigger than the Sun, I mean, it just never twigged my radar. Many of the opaque nebulae are light years across.

Right, but they’re not in our solar system.

And, well, comets coming inside the orbit of Jupiter tend to be very violent locations. It was the Giotti probe that actually got some very grainy photographs of a cometary nucleus in eruption during the most recent return of Halley’s Comet to the inner Solar System.

It wasn’t so much the explosion that freaked me out, but an explosion that created a cloud so mammoth as to be larger than the system’s primary. I mean, as I understand it, we started off with an object significantly smaller than the moon, and it erupted so violently as to create a debris field significantly larger than the sun.

[OtakuLoki]

Fair enough.

I wonder how large the gas cloud created by the explosion on Apollo XIII was.

[Tristan]

@Siam Sam

Rats! I was hoping that it WAS named after John Holmes and maybe because it had such a big appendage. “Comet Johnny Wadd” has a nice ring to it.

One of those special rings I see advertised in magazines, right?