A Planet Wider Than Jupiter, Lighter Than Water Shrink Earth to the size of a regulation golf ball, about 1.7 inches across (4.3 cm), and the planet in this story balloons out to a sphere roughly 3.5 feet wide (1.07 m), tall enough that you’d duck to walk under it in a kitchen. That planet … Read more
The Scale You Can Picture Imagine a giant balance scale with Jupiter sitting on one pan. On the other pan, you start loading Earths, one at a time. The beam won’t level out until you’ve stacked 317.83 of them there. Not “hundreds.” That exact ratio is what NASA’s own planetary fact sheet gives for the … Read more
KOI-55 b: A Catalog Number Hotter Than the Sun’s Own Face Picture the Sun’s photosphere, the visible skin of light you were told as a kid never to stare at. Its effective temperature sits at about 5,772 K, the reference value the International Astronomical Union adopted in 2015 for solar comparisons everywhere. Now set a … Read more
A Year Shorter Than an Eight-Hour Shift Picture clocking in for a regular eight-hour shift. Somewhere out there, an entire planet completes its whole year, every season it has, well before that shift ends. You’d barely be through your first coffee break before that world had already lived out one full year, with time still … Read more
Thirty Earths, End to End Stand thirty Earths side by side, each one touching the next, and you would just about span the gap to the Moon. Earth’s diameter, the full width across, not the radius, is 7,918 miles (12,742 km). Line up thirty of those and you land close to 238,900 miles (384,400 km), … Read more
A Rock the Size of an Apartment Building Passed 18.39 Moons Out An asteroid roughly the size of an apartment building passed Earth at about 18.39 times the distance to the Moon. It happened on September 10, 2026, at 19:07 UTC, and astronomers call it 2009 SK. That gap counts as close, in the bookkeeping … Read more
A Stadium-Sized Rock Crossed Our Doorstep at 45,000 Miles an Hour A boulder big enough to fill a stadium tore past Earth at about 45,200 miles an hour (20.2 kilometers per second), and it never came anywhere close to hitting anything. That was asteroid 2026 OH3, at its nearest to Earth on September 11, 2026, … Read more
The Asteroid Pass We Couldn’t Confirm Picture a rock roughly the length of a football stadium sliding past Earth without so much as a ripple, no warning, no danger, nothing that would ever make the local news. That’s the shape of a claim now attached to an object designated 2026 OH3: a close approach said … Read more
A Close Pass We Can’t Vouch For, Yet A small asteroid supposedly slipped past Earth close enough to count as a genuinely tight approach by solar-system standards, several times farther out than the Moon but still well inside what usually counts as roomy. That’s the claim, anyway. It arrived with a name, 2026 RJ, a … Read more
458 Plutos to Match One Earth The number that most quietly disqualified Pluto from the planet category was never the orbit shape or the crowded neighborhood. It was the mass. Pluto carries 1.303 × 10²² kilograms, and you would need 458.3 of them to reach Earth’s 5.9722 × 10²⁴ kilograms. Not a shrunken version of … Read more
