10 Facts About The Universe That Make Your Brain Hurt
6. If You Could Put Saturn In Water Then It Would Float
I have heard this fact many times recently, but that does not stop it being spectacular when you put it that way. If you were to put the planet Saturn into a big enough tank of water it would float. This is because its density is 0.687 grams per cm3 while water's is 0.998 grams per cm3. Notwithstanding that the tank would have to be over 120,000 km in diameter to achieve this, it's a pretty cool fact that tells us more about the nature of the universe. Nothing is absolute, you see. It is all to do with a thing called 'relative density', or a comparison of the density of one material to the density of a particular standard, such as water, at a given temperature or pressure. You might also have heard it called specific gravity. Saturn is simply less dense than water. It all depends upon how much matter there is in a substance. We call the amount of matter in a substance combined with its inertia, mass. It is different from weight because weight can change with variations in gravity on the object. It is for this reason that the same object is heavier on Earth than on the moon. There is less gravity on the moon and mass remains the same in both cases. So, why bring this up? Well, one reason is that once we dig further into issues surrounding mass, density, atoms and the basic building blocks of the universe things begin to get decidedly weird - brain hurtingly weird.
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
I have heard this fact many times recently, but that does not stop it being spectacular when you put it that way. If you were to put the planet Saturn into a big enough tank of water it would float. This is because its density is 0.687 grams per cm3 while water's is 0.998 grams per cm3. Notwithstanding that the tank would have to be over 120,000 km in diameter to achieve this, it's a pretty cool fact that tells us more about the nature of the universe. Nothing is absolute, you see. It is all to do with a thing called 'relative density', or a comparison of the density of one material to the density of a particular standard, such as water, at a given temperature or pressure. You might also have heard it called specific gravity. Saturn is simply less dense than water. It all depends upon how much matter there is in a substance. We call the amount of matter in a substance combined with its inertia, mass. It is different from weight because weight can change with variations in gravity on the object. It is for this reason that the same object is heavier on Earth than on the moon. There is less gravity on the moon and mass remains the same in both cases. So, why bring this up? Well, one reason is that once we dig further into issues surrounding mass, density, atoms and the basic building blocks of the universe things begin to get decidedly weird - brain hurtingly weird.