Imagine throwing a baseball. just right? Maybe you’ve done it a few times already. Now imagine you are pitching a baseball the moon.
Maybe you’ve seen enough videos of astronauts hopping around up there to get an idea. However, here’s a clearer picture: on the moon, you could toss this ball cleanly across the ground 186 foot high Leaning Tower of Pisa.
OK, now imagine you are on Saturn. That’s a little harder to imagine, isn’t it? No one was there, let alone recorded a video.
Good luck, astronomer James O’Donogue did the math and made his own video showing a ball toss on every planet, plus Pluto and the moon. Look below:
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“We can currently only experience outer space through images and videos, so this style of video is meant to add more to the experience, which is feeling the forces on these other worlds,” says O’Donoghue, who works on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Insider via email with.
“We’re throwing this ball at about the maximum speed that the average person can throw … without practice, according to various sources on the internet (baseball sources mostly),” he said.
From there, gravity determines how far the ball flies. The gravity of a planet results from its mass – More massive objects have stronger gravity – but the density also plays a decisive role.
“Saturn, for example, is 95 times more massive than Earth, but it’s the most dense planet in the solar system,” O’Donoghue said. “So if you’re on the fringes [Saturn]gravity pulls you in [is] actually weaker than on Earth.”
Therefore, there is nothing special about throwing a ball at Saturn. The really remarkable throw happens next Pluto, the small ice ball of a former planet.
At only two-thirds the diameter of our Moon, Pluto has such a weak gravity your baseball could overcome it 455 foot high Great Pyramid of Giza – with room to manoeuvre.
In the end, the ball would fly 16 times further on Pluto than on Earth.
The video plays in “real time” and shows how long each ball toss would take, O’Donoghue said. On Pluto it takes a yawning 47 seconds.
“I wonder how boring it would be to stumble across it after running as an astronaut in this world,” he said.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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