Burgerland units aside, the math on this ain’t mathing…
A 12oz can is about 360 ml. A baby elephant is something like 100 +/- 10kg. That’s a density of 300kg / 360cm³ = 833.3 g/cm³ (plus or minus 10%). The heaviest element that is common enough to be found naturally floating about in big chunks is lead, and that’s just 11.3 g/cm³. The actual heaviest with sufficiently stable isotopes is Osmium with 22.6 g/cm³. Most meteorites are nowhere near even that, with the heaviest usually being made of iron and around 7 or 8 g/cm³.
Since i don’t think there are any compressive forces acting on a free floating chunk of… whatever this is supposed to be out in space that could increase density to the point where these numbers work out, i assume this is either a joke or someone misread the data by a factor of 100.
Alternatively, the asteroid could be travelling at 99.995% the speed of light for a relativistic mass dilation by a factor of 100. I also highly doubt this.
I’m pretty sure you couldn’t see something this small at that distance with current telescopes unless it emitted some pretty bright light. Like say, if it had a very bright tail much bigger than itself (not possible in this case, too small, you only see tails on much bigger comets) or if it entered an atmosphere at high speed and burned up. Problem is Mars barely has any atmosphere to speak of…i mean it has one but it’s a hundred times less dense than Earth’s.
Another way of detecting fairly small objects in space is by observing occlusion of light sources behind them, since you can detect fairly tiny decreases in the intensity of a light source when something passes in front of it even if that object itself is too small to be seen. It’s how we detect exoplanets. But i don’t think that is applicable in this case, and even this method has limits.
Yet another method by which you could detect and measure the mass of things that can’t be visibly seen is by observing gravitational pull on other nearby objects that are visible. But again this is most likely not applicable here because the size is too small. On anything asteroid sized you generally measure mass via spectroscopy (for which you need to be able to see the thing), analyzing chemical composition and inferring mass from density and observable size.
At least this is what i remember from my astrophysics classes back in uni. It’s been over a decade though so things have advanced since then, i could be out of date on my knowledge…
Yeah, I basically can’t think of a method that would let you detect something so tiny even from a Mars orbiter, unless it just happened to get fantastically lucky and this thing flew by the camera at the exact right moment.
I’m also not sure how small is too small for something to be detectable with current technology when it’s as far away as Mars, but i’m fairly sure a 6-12 cm diameter is too small. I think the smallest asteroids recorded are at least a meter or two across, and those were detected much closer to Earth.
Burgerland units aside, the math on this ain’t mathing…
A 12oz can is about 360 ml. A baby elephant is something like 100 +/- 10kg. That’s a density of 300kg / 360cm³ = 833.3 g/cm³ (plus or minus 10%). The heaviest element that is common enough to be found naturally floating about in big chunks is lead, and that’s just 11.3 g/cm³. The actual heaviest with sufficiently stable isotopes is Osmium with 22.6 g/cm³. Most meteorites are nowhere near even that, with the heaviest usually being made of iron and around 7 or 8 g/cm³.
Since i don’t think there are any compressive forces acting on a free floating chunk of… whatever this is supposed to be out in space that could increase density to the point where these numbers work out, i assume this is either a joke or someone misread the data by a factor of 100.
Alternatively, the asteroid could be travelling at 99.995% the speed of light for a relativistic mass dilation by a factor of 100. I also highly doubt this.
lol yeah this thing would have to be incredibly dense, also I can’t imagine how you’d even detect something so small
Another fun fact: the density this thing would have would be far higher than the density of anything found outside of the cores of stars.
I think we can safely conclude the meme is not actually real :)
I’m pretty sure you couldn’t see something this small at that distance with current telescopes unless it emitted some pretty bright light. Like say, if it had a very bright tail much bigger than itself (not possible in this case, too small, you only see tails on much bigger comets) or if it entered an atmosphere at high speed and burned up. Problem is Mars barely has any atmosphere to speak of…i mean it has one but it’s a hundred times less dense than Earth’s.
Another way of detecting fairly small objects in space is by observing occlusion of light sources behind them, since you can detect fairly tiny decreases in the intensity of a light source when something passes in front of it even if that object itself is too small to be seen. It’s how we detect exoplanets. But i don’t think that is applicable in this case, and even this method has limits.
Yet another method by which you could detect and measure the mass of things that can’t be visibly seen is by observing gravitational pull on other nearby objects that are visible. But again this is most likely not applicable here because the size is too small. On anything asteroid sized you generally measure mass via spectroscopy (for which you need to be able to see the thing), analyzing chemical composition and inferring mass from density and observable size.
At least this is what i remember from my astrophysics classes back in uni. It’s been over a decade though so things have advanced since then, i could be out of date on my knowledge…
Yeah, I basically can’t think of a method that would let you detect something so tiny even from a Mars orbiter, unless it just happened to get fantastically lucky and this thing flew by the camera at the exact right moment.
Perhaps the baby elephants are extremely light, has anyone checked in on them?
Maybe they meant baby elephant seals? Still way too big but it’s closer.
Oh hey, the elephant shrew could work! But not as babies tho…too small…
I’m also not sure how small is too small for something to be detectable with current technology when it’s as far away as Mars, but i’m fairly sure a 6-12 cm diameter is too small. I think the smallest asteroids recorded are at least a meter or two across, and those were detected much closer to Earth.
This one was about one meter in diameter but that came as close as 12,600 km to Earth. Mars is at least 56 million km away.