Comment by mapt
4 hours ago
The correct compromise would be "500km diameter, about the size of Ohio"
This is moderately misleading in some ways, but illustrative enough and also technically valid if somebody wants to model it accurately.
4 hours ago
The correct compromise would be "500km diameter, about the size of Ohio"
This is moderately misleading in some ways, but illustrative enough and also technically valid if somebody wants to model it accurately.
> This is moderately misleading in some ways
I think that this is more than moderately misleading, because it is ambiguous:
- if they meant "diameter is similar to Ohio dimensions", they are a little bit off, because Ohio is about 355*355 km and Enceladus diameter is around 500km
- if they meant surface area, then they are very off, because Ohio is 116,096 km^2 while Enceladus is about 800,000 km^2. In this case it would be more accurate to say that it is bigger then Texas, but smaller than Alaska (if we want to use US states for comparison)
> - if they meant "diameter is similar to Ohio dimensions", they are a little bit off, because Ohio is about 355*355 km and Enceladus diameter is around 500km
I think they used the diagonal of a hypothetical square Ohio: sqrt(355^2 + 355^2) ≈ 502 km.
The classical definition of diameter of a set is "the largest possible distance between two points". So in this sense your square Ohio has a diameter of 502 km.
(It is still misleading to compare it to the diameter of an almost-spherical object, I agree. Especially because moving on the surface of a sphere it takes much longer than 502 km to walk from one point to the antipodal one.)
If so, they passed up the opportunity to make another dumb Ohio joke:
"Ohio isn't actually square, though you wouldn't know that from talking to the inhabitants" or some such.