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Last Post 10/12/2020 11:56 AM by  Terry Kucera
pluto & the sun
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Anna





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10/11/2020 8:44 PM
    How many plutos would fit inside the Sun?

    Terry Kucera



    Basic Member


    Posts:328
    Basic Member


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    10/12/2020 11:56 AM
    Hi. Fun question!
    That depends on what kind of assumptions you make (if you crammed all
    those Plutos together they might smoosh together in wierd ways), but if
    we just want to compare the volumes of the Sun and Pluto we can do it
    with a bit of math. I don't know what grade you are in, but this is
    something you should eventually be able to do even if you can't now.

    Both the Sun and Pluto are basically spheres, so they have a volume of

    V=4/3 pi (d/2)^3 = amount of space the sphere takes up

    Where d is the diameter of the sphere
    d_sun = diameter of the sun
    d_pluto=diameter of pluto
    pi= is a constant about equal to 3.14
    V_sun = Volume of the Sun
    V_pluto = Volume of Pluto
    the ^3 is just a way of saying multiply something by itself three times
    2^3 = 2 x 2 x 2= 8
    or
    10^3 = 10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000

    V_sun / V_pluto = 4/3 pi (d_sun/2)^3 / 4/3 pi (d_pluto/2)^3
    =d_sun^3/d_pluto^3

    You can look up the diameters of the Sun and Pluto here:

    https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.g...planetary/factsheet/
    https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.g...ctsheet/sunfact.html

    d_pluto= 2,376 km
    d_sun =1,390,000 km
    so V_sun/V_pluto = 1,390,000^3/2,376^3
    =2.69 x 10^18 /1.34 x 10^10
    =2.00 x 10^8
    =200,000,000

    So, roughly, you could fit 200 million Plutos in the volume of the Sun
    (10^6 = 1,000,000 = 1 million).

    I'm taking you through all this math because that is what I had to do
    to figure it out. Also, this way if someone wants to understand what I did, they can
    look at the calculation.

    Terry


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