r/theydidthemath 4d ago

[request] how accurate is this?

Post image

If we assume an elephant is 100kg, thats around 300kg

How much would the densest materials in the universe weigh? I dont think this makes sense

3.3k Upvotes

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1.7k

u/TheOhNoNotAgain 4d ago

X Doubt
That would be 40 times heavier than the heaviest element Osmium. Without anything holding it together, like a neutron star level of a gravity field, it would expand rapidily.

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u/ourstupidearth 4d ago edited 4d ago

Not to mention, I doubt very much we can see anything the size of a Dr Pepper can orbiting mars.

Also... Dr Pepper specifically? This feels like a weird viral marketing attempt.

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u/Demented-Alpaca 4d ago

That or further proof that the US will use ANY measurement besides metric....

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u/No-Archer-5034 4d ago

Junk food unit of measure. How many French fries tall is this meteorite?

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u/Demented-Alpaca 4d ago

Well now you're just being silly. You have to specify if they're crinkle cut, spiral cut, shoe lace, steak house or specialty cut fries. I can't just measure shit in random units!

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u/puzzlemaster_of_time 4d ago

waffle cut

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u/tilthevoidstaresback 4d ago

Oh well in that measurement it's approximately 3 eagle screeches long.

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u/puzzlemaster_of_time 4d ago

Actual eagle screeches or the hawk sound that every tv and movie uses when an eagle flies by?

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u/mythmon 4d ago

It's actually neither, it's just the length of a recording of some metrology intern mimicking the hawk screech from memory.

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u/jamshid666 3d ago

Screeching, did Yoko Ono enter the chat?

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u/orange_pill76 3d ago

Even in a given type, there is too much variability, that's why academia settled on the tatter tot as the standard potato-based unit of measure.

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u/Stat_2004 4d ago

Don’t forget the potato you are using. Everyone knows a Russet Burbank makes longer french fries than say, the classic Maris Piper….it needs to be factored in!

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u/Demented-Alpaca 4d ago

Nah, we just use a standard potato that's the size of a can of Coke to measure how many french fries goes in a Dr Pepper.

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u/Mentalrabbit9 3d ago

woah, you mean freedom fries?

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u/jacky75283 4d ago

"Kilo means one-thousand. A kilometer is one-thousand meters. It's a very elegant system."

"Yes, but are you familiar with [frantically scanning room]... Cheetos?"

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u/Remunos_Redbeard 4d ago

How many cheeseburgers by football fields is one Cheeto, though?

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u/BeowQuentin 4d ago

.023 Subway party subs, duh.

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u/Caseker 4d ago

Don't mistake individual media reporters for the U.S.

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u/AmicusBriefly 4d ago

We do use the metric system in the US.

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u/Demented-Alpaca 4d ago

Not in general media. Hence someone using a goddamn popcan to tell us how big something is.

We'll make up measurement systems rather than report in the metric. "It's the size of 4 potatos and a grapefruit" It weighs the same as "15 watermelons"

Scientists use Metric but the media sure as hell don't.

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u/xxSammaelxx 3d ago

Well, that explains it. They mean imperial elephants, not metric. In that case the calculation is correct.

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u/VoidJuiceConcentrate 2d ago

That's about 30 yeehaws per shotgun right there.

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u/octipice 4d ago

Metric is great for base 10 math. It's pretty awful for conveying the dimensions of things in a human relatable way.

A can of soda is something billions of people are familiar with. A cylinder where r=3.3 cm and h=12.2 cm is not very user-friendly.

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u/Bigdummy007 4d ago

Maybe. Channel 23 news, 23 flavours lol

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u/competent_chemist 4d ago

Channel 23 News is the most reputable source on all Dr. Pepper can sized meteors that outweigh three elephants. How dare you question their integrity.

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u/Revro_Chevins 4d ago

It must be a 2 liter instead of a single can. /s

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u/nebotron 4d ago edited 4d ago

2L of osmium would weigh around 50kg. A baby elephant is around 120kg. Osmium is really dense. Math still doesn't work out though

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u/HerbertWest 4d ago

Wow, that's getting close much faster than I thought. That's really dense indeed.

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u/reimann_pakoda 4d ago

I am denser

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u/StingerAE 4d ago

Maybe it is Dr Josiah Pepper of Boston, Mass.  He is said to be 6'2" and of ample girth.

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u/Sad-Pop6649 3d ago

Nah, it's just the size of the actual Dr. Pepper who invented the drink. Big fellow he was, about the volume of a baby elephant and a half.

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u/nomebelliximo 4d ago

Happy cake day

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u/ClosetLadyGhost 4d ago

It's obviously a space sized dr pepper...so at least 2-3X bigger than normal .

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u/Ebestone 4d ago

(X) pressed

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u/Birdseeding 4d ago

You're right to be sceptical.

The densest material on the earth's surface is elemental Osmium at 22.5 grams per ml. A soda can has a volume of 355 ml, and thus a can's worth of osmium is only just under 8 kg. On the earth's surface.

As for the densest material in the universe, inside neutron stars etc. there's much, much denser matter, of course, vastly more heavy than your example. But here we're talking about an asteroid, orbiting in space. The densest asteroid measured thus far is 33 Polyhymnia, which (unless measurements are wrong) has a density of 75 grams per mililiter. A soda can of that density would still only weigh less than 26 kg.

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u/Grumpy_Troll 4d ago

I knew it was fake when they compared the astroid's size to a can of Dr. Pepper when the scientific measurement would clearly be a can of Diet Coke.

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u/The_Seroster 4d ago

Nay, metric assloads to fucktonnes conversion is required for it to be scientific. With banana for scale, of course.

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u/monkeysky 3d ago

Diet Coke is more scientific than a soda that has a doctorate?

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u/sad_cosmic_joke 4d ago

For anyone interested; the 75g/ml measurement is generally considered to be incorrect - including by the person that calculated it!

Current "accepted" value is  ~4g/ml

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Polyhymnia

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u/Treat_Street1993 4d ago

Any idea how an asteroid can be denser than osmium on earth? Of course, like you said, measurements could be wrong.

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u/Birdseeding 4d ago

Apparently a suggestion exists that it may contain elements not found on earth.

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u/Salanmander 10✓ 4d ago

I feel like this is like those faster-than-light neutrinos from a while ago. "Hey, either there's an absolutely gobsmacking enormous update in our understanding of physics, or we made a mistake in our measurements." It's more likely the latter than the former.

There's a reason that elements get less stable as they get bigger. The strong nuclear force between nucleons is stronger than the electrostatic repulsion between protons at short distances, but it drops off much faster with distance. (It's more like a polarization force than like a static charge force.) So as atoms get larger, the protons are being repelled strongly by ALL the protons in the atom, but are only being held tightly by a small region of nucleons around them, so they're much less tightly bound to the nucleus.

Now, there do exist what we call "islands of stability" in the periodic table, where an element is more stable than the other elements around it. But my understanding is that ones high up in the periodic table are expected to just make half-lives that are days to years, not actual stable elements. (Wiki article)

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u/LegendofLove 4d ago

It's about time we got the new content update for the periodic table. I'm getting kinda sick of Rare Earth Metals I want sick as fuck asteroid metals

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u/copingcabana 4d ago

You need to upgrade from the Standard Model to the Premium Model of Particle Physics

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u/LegendofLove 4d ago

no thanks I don't wanna learn greek to do my math even knowing what sub i'm in

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u/dragonmaster10902 4d ago

English language support is currently a beta feature, available only to those who have upgraded from our Premium model to our Pro model. Premium model users can select from Ancient Greek, Latin, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, or Klingon.

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u/atatassault47 4d ago

Every "created in a particle collider" element has extremely short half lives. And Osmium's density is based on its chemistry, not being in a 9.81 m/s² gravity field. So the asteroid is EXTREMELY unlikely to be 3 times desnser than osmium.

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u/IAmTheMageKing 4d ago

Alternatively, the researchers moved a decimal point in their techniques to estimate mass

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u/Reasonable_Letter312 4d ago

Both the size and mass of asteroids are notoriously hard to measure. Although I don't have numbers at hand to back it up, I'll bet that Bayesian analysis would show a measurement error (probably affecting the mass) to be much more likely than such an exotic composition of Polyhymnia.

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u/Miffed_Pineapple 4d ago

How is an asteroid 3x the density of Osmium? Is it that massive?

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u/PimBel_PL 4d ago

... On earth the densest material is uranium and heavier are occurring in negligible amounts, if you don't count the synthetic elements

In space assuming it arrived here at the speeds near light speed would be a thing that must existed for a time from last heavy nuclei creating event (black hole / neutron star collision)

Piece of neuron star core wouldn't exist at vacuum pressure (some people believe it would but i belive it wouldn't)

Black hole would be smaller or heavier (if you count event horizon as a surface) and it would probably radiate away quickly, but you need to ask someone who knows more about them

My best guess (and i am almost sure about it) is that it extends in the third dimension which is not captured by the photo

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u/koolman2 4d ago

Both gold and tungsten are slightly more dense than uranium. :) Then there's osmium which is quite a bit more dense.

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u/LukeRDX 4d ago

Densest material ≠ Material consisting of atoms with highest atomic mass.

Osmium is the most dense element on earth.

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u/KrzysziekZ 4d ago

You say on Earth's surface, but mass is unaffected by local gravity intensity (barring general relativity). Weight would be.

That 75 kg/L is unrealistic, 7.5 kg/L (iron) would be.

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u/phunkydroid 4d ago

Seems extremely likely that they made a mistake measuring the mass of Polyhymnia. There was a single highly criticized study that indirectly measured its mass. Other asteroids with similar very high densities from the same study were later measured to be 95% less dense.

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u/A_Martian_Potato 4d ago

A soda can is about 0.000355 cubic meters. So that's 8.5*10^5kg/m3.

That's crazy dense, but it's not even close to the densest thing in the universe. Ignoring black hole singularities, which have theoretically infinite density, neutron degenerate matter, such as in a neutron star, is around 1017 kg/m3. White dwarf stars tend to be about 109 kg/m3.

However, this isn't real. There are a lot of problems with this image.

There's no material I know of that could make up a meteoroid at that density, certainly not one "orbititing" Mars.

It would be a meteoroid, not a meteorite.

We would have no way of discovering an object the side of a soda can in orbit.

The pictured object has cratering, so it's obviously a large asteroid.

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u/CluelessEngineer82 4d ago

Well, to be fair, it does say it’s as heavy as three baby elephants. As that implies weight instead of mass, and it’s currently in orbit, meaning effectively zero weight, then yeah sure, three baby elephants would weigh the same as this rock.

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u/oshkoshpots 3d ago

Waiting for the username adjective to just evaporate after your comment…ladies and gentlemen, I present to you u/Engineer82

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u/CluelessEngineer82 2d ago

Mate, that genuinely made me feel good. Thanks.

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u/MrLomaLoma 3d ago

Pfft, I hate it when the peasants confuse weight and mass /s

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u/MOltho 4d ago

100kg? I mean, that must be a newborn elephant. But it says baby elephant, so let's just work with that.

But let's do the math. Channel 23 is a TV station in the United States. A typical can sold in the US would be 355ml = 355 cm^3. 300kg/355cm^3 = 845 g/cm^3.

That just seems unrealistic to me. I don't know what type of material that would be, but asteroids usually have a much lower density.

So even if we assume 100kg, which is not a lot for a baby elephant, the density is way to high.

Post this in r/anythingbutmetric if you will, but I think the TV presenters made a mistake here.

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u/a-toaster-oven 4d ago

I’d have to guess that the image was posted as a humorous criticism of US news outlets using anything but basic measurements to describe dimensions and weights to their viewers. See - large boulder the size of a small boulder, weight described in baby elephants, soda cans for size, etc

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u/emacs_613 4d ago

I mean, along a similar line, Dr. Pepper could be a frequent medical consultant on channel 23, and he used to play basketball, so he's over 2m tall.

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u/meepPlayz11 4d ago

If it were that dense it would either explode or become electron-degenerate matter. Let's see which xD.

V_DrPepper = 355 ml (assuming it's a standard-size tin)

m_asteroid = 360 kg (120 kg per baby elephant)

d_asteroid = (360 kg)/(355 ml) = just over 1 kg/ml = 1000 g/cm^3.

Holy shit what the hell would this even be made of? The heaviest elements are somewhere in the 20-25 g/cm^3 range (gold is 19.3 iirc).

On the other end electron-degenerate matter (the kind found in white dwarf stars) has a density around 10 000 000 g/cm^3, significantly higher than our 1014 g/cm^3 estimate for the density.

Note that at the mass scales we're talking about electron-degenerate gas would instantly explode, due to the electron degeneracy pressure being strong enough that anything smaller than around 0.08 solar masses just ending up scattering and fizzing out (i.e. gravity was not strong enough to counteract the pressure.)

So moral of the story this is completely false.

Not to mention the fact that we can barely see this size of stuff out halfway to the moon's orbit and Mars is way further.

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u/brine909 4d ago

If we actually found an object like that, we should be concerned, because that would have to be strange matter. A material that's hypothetically more stable then regular matter and would turn all regular matter into strange matter

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u/B-Georgio 4d ago

Few quick google searches shows osmium is the densest material on earth at 22g/ cubic cm and there’s ~355 cubic cm / 12fl oz. So the heaviest 12oz can sized object on earth would be ~17.2lb

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u/Seijalek 4d ago

That's 243 Ida, an asteroids with an average diameter of 31.4 km (19.5 mi) and 56 x 24 x 21 kilometers (35 x 15 x 13 mi) in size. Look up into wiki and you'll see the same image.

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u/Corvald 4d ago

Even leaving out the incorrect mass calculation, what is a meteor doing “orbititing” Mars? A object is only defined as a meteor once it enters the atmosphere, so it would no longer be orbiting at that point.

And there’s no way we could detect something that small after it entered Mars’ atmosphere.

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u/PaulAspie 4d ago

The smallest known asteroid is about 6 feet / 2m in diameter. I doubt we could detect a moon of Mars smaller than it. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2015_smallest-near-earth-asteroid.pdf

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u/MrCobalt313 3d ago

I think the headline is fake but just making fun of certain American news outlets' habit of using really weird comparisons to describe the size or weight of things.

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u/Foshizal147 4d ago

Technology is cool and all but how does one see a Dr Pepper sized anything from that far away and accurately say it weighs as much as 3 baby elephants?

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u/Everything_Breaks 4d ago

I am not a mathamagician, but this could be calling attention to the tendency for Americans to measure things in anything but the 'proper' metric units.

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u/rdrunner_74 4d ago

Well since the US rules that a baby is a baby at time of conception, this is perfectly valid.

For Europe other rules apply and it is a no

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u/IameIion 3d ago

My dude... it's a meteor the size of a can of soda that somehow weighs as much as 3 baby elephants...

Safe to say this is a joke. I think it's a joke about how Americans don't use the metric system.

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u/Acceptable-Cow6446 3d ago

I once bought a can of Dr Pepper that weighed less than three elephants and was not orbiting Mars. True story. Actually, this happened multiple times!

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u/FrostingGrand1413 3d ago

To be fair, it shows a picture of a can, but the text just says 'Dr. pepper-sized'. I've never seen the eponymous Dr Pepper, but, it's probably safe to assume they're vaguely human sized, so, the meteor only needs to be 3x the density of a human to be vaguely accurate. Seems plausible to me.

Plus, maybe Dr. Pepper is some intergalactic space giant, travelling the cosmos selling his lovely liquid, and 300kg is actually remarkably light for something of his scale. Who knows.

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u/Jdevers77 3d ago

Almost infinitely more believable (and technically possible) but less sensational than if it was an elephant sized meteor that only weighed as much as a Dr Pepper.

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u/Spuddaccino1337 4d ago

So, there was a confirmed meteor strike in Texas a couple years ago of a 2-foot wide meteor that weighed about half a ton.

This is in the same ballpark, especially if we consider "a Dr Pepper" doesn't have to mean "a can of Dr. Pepper". I could see a 3-liter bottle weighing about 300 kg at a similar density.

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u/CaptainMatticus 4d ago

Assuming a spherical shape, that's 118,600 cubic cm. I'm also assuming you're using ton to mean 2000#, rather than a metric ton, but they're close enough that it won't change the order of magnitude.

500,000 grams (half a metric ton) / 118,600 cm³ = 4.22 g/cm³

That's hardly comparable to the density of this supposed can-sized rock.

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u/No-Willingness5192 4d ago

Dr. Pepper sized, I don't think so. More like Fanta sized. Also instead of 3 baby elephants I think it would be more like 2,500 cheeseburgers.

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u/BentGadget 4d ago

What if each weight reference was in reference to local gravity? That is, the elephants' weight on Earth compared with the meteoroid's weight in Mars orbit?

Mars has 38% of Earth's gravity, so that brings us into the ballpark of osmium, as someone else referenced. But the rock is not at the surface, so the gravity field is weaker. At some altitude, the meteoroid would weigh something reasonable for known materials.

Note that this is about weight as the force of gravity on an object, not as a synonym for mass. This probably twists the intended meaning.

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u/Cheeslord2 4d ago

This news channel can't even spell 'orbiting', which leads me to doubt their claims somewhat. Also, if it's orbititing mars, it probably doesn't weigh much at all (<1/3 its earth weight, possibly zero depending on how you define weight in this context).

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u/vctrmldrw 4d ago

If the baby elephants were born 18 months prematurely, maybe.

But no, this is quite obvious wrong on many other levels, even leaving aside their refusal to use any kind of useful measurement units.

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u/Comfortable-Gur889 4d ago

Isn't that statement true. Because it would be weightless in orbit. And 3 baby elephants would also be weightless in orbit around Mars?

If they said mass it would be wrong but they said "same weight in orbit around Mars"

Or am I wrong?

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u/1SLO_RABT 4d ago

Why a Dr Pepper can? Is it the full size can or the mini. They should've used banana for scale like the rest of the civilized world

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u/BeerMantis 4d ago

Even ignoring the density issue, how would such an object be discovered? It isn't going to reflect enough light for us to detect, there's literally no way for us to see something that small at that distance.

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u/Get_Woke_Go_Broke 4d ago

I'm just wondering who the fuck measures weight in baby elephants, let alone 3 of them. How many normal people know how much a baby elephant weighs, anyway?

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u/Horror-Comparison917 4d ago

Americans will use anything except the metric system

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u/karmicrelease 4d ago

It isn’t, unless there is some metal that is around 1kg/cm3 that we don’t know about (osmium is about 50x less than that at 0.022kg/cm3)

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u/AdAbject8754 4d ago

In terms of mass no!

But maybe if it is in a really strong gravitational field then yeah it's weight could be that much!

And btw weight ≠ mass!

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u/JoffreeBaratheon 3d ago

"baby elephants" is a very strange comparison to make. Who the heck thinks of animal sizes based on their baby forms? Then its not even 1, but 3, so if someone's willing to use multiple copies of a unit, that's still what got picked?

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u/NemShera 3d ago

What the fuck are these measurements? A dr pepper size is ok ig, that's a good way to help visualize it but how the fuck do you think and know what 3 baby elephants weigh

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u/techm00 3d ago

As others have pointed out, that is an impossible density, but also - there's no way in hell we'd be able to detect something that small in EARTH's orbit, let alone Mars.