Except if it was a 6-Earth-mass hamburger, gravity would immediately pull it into a sphere, the heat would melt it, it would differentiate, the metals from the meat going to the center to form a very tiny core. The main elements would be oxygen, carbon, hydrogen & nitrogen.../1
2/...in that order. They would form carbon dioxide (30.1%), water (45.5%), and methane (31.7%). There would be 1% nitrogen. Like Pluto the nitrogen would be in the atmosphere and surface ice. Maybe nitrogen glaciers would glow, like on Pluto!
3/ This “hamburger” would be quite hot, since it collapsed into a sphere all at once. Doubtless it would have liquid water oceans in the mantle. It would likely have a methane atmosphere like a Titan, but thicker with higher pressure since this is a 5-Earth mass burger.
4/ The heat and pressure would likely keep some methane liquid at the surface, like the lakes of Titan.
5/ There was a recent study arguing that Pluto kept its liquid subsurface ocean because it formed quickly before the heat could all radiate away from the surface. The gravitationally rounded burger would be even hotter. news.ucsc.edu/2020/06/pluto-…
6/ With all that water, methane, and CO2, plus so much energy, there would be cryovolcanism recycling materials between the mantle and the crust, like on Europa. The crust would develop interesting geological features as the materials move around. What an amazing hamburger!
7/ The energy would also rework the chemistry of these ices. It would create tholins — complicated chain and cyclic molecules, the building blocks of life. Of course the hamburger started out as organic matter, but a fraction would become organic matter again. Chemistry happens!
8/ Some day we can visit this gravitationally processed hamburger. Will there be life swimming in its subsurface oceans? Will there be intelligent being living on its crust, or flying to the top of the brown hazy atmosphere to get a peek at the stars? (sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/a…)
9/ Will the thick atmosphere have storms that weather the crustal materials into small grains, forming vast dune fields like on Mars? (Will there be sand worms?)
10/ Will mountains of ice form (like on Pluto), then weather away, and form again? (bbc.com/news/science-e…)
11/ This burger had plenty of hydrogen to begin with, so maybe like Uranus and Neptune there will be liquid metal hydrogen deep down near its tiny core, creating a dynamo to form a magnetic field. (svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4666)
12/ My point is that a 5-Earth-mass hamburger is indistinguishable from a planet. 😉That’s the cool thing about planets: just by being big enough to be gravitationally rounded, but not so big that fusion begins (releasing a flux of energy that wipes out much of the diversity)...
13/ ...just by being in that sweet spot of size, an amazing engine of complexity turns on. Planets constitute a tiny fraction of the mass of the cosmos, but the most interesting stuff in all the cosmos happens there! Even a big enough hamburger would have this result.
14/ We know so much more about it now than Galileo did, but this was precisely the insight Galileo had when his telescope revealed mountains on the Moon. He realized it is “another Earth”, & since the Moon is a planet, so all the planets are complex geological bodies like Earth.
15/ And this is really what the concept of a planet is. It is about the sweet spot of nature where complexity turns on, where geology and chemistry come alive, where life might sometimes exist. Planets are diverse, but this is their common core.❤️
16/16 By the way, I couldn’t find the elemental composition of a hamburger so I focused on just the patty. I couldn’t find that, so I used a cow. I couldn’t find that either, so I used a human. I found that! So in realty, this is the planet you’d get from a 5-Earth-mass human🤭😝

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More from @DrPhiltill

10 Sep
Some say, “This is the best idea for the future of humanity EVER!” Others say “This is colonialism that will destroy the Moon and enslave the poor!” IMO, both sides are seeing some real truth, and there’s a way that they fit together...(short thread) /1
2/ (Dives into this briar patch)

First, there is no risk of companies strip mining the Moon and ruining it until closer to the year 2100, because there are no valuable resources on the Moon that you can sell on Earth. You can get everything on Earth a million times cheaper.
3/ Second, we don’t have the technology to mine the Moon large-scale. The tech development *alone* will likely take 30 to 40 years to make a large-scale lunar mining venture economically viable. The key will be reducing the need for humans to stand around repairing broken robots.
Read 46 tweets
1 Sep
A visit from @deneigebroom @WFTV interviewing Gigi about her #breastcancer and running the virtual @bostonmarathon Sept 12. Gigi’s story is inspiring and we hope people will come cheer her race, making a comeback from chemo & raising funds for a great charity...
Gigi is supporting the Sisters Network, Orlando chapter, which is raising awareness of breast cancer among African American women and supporting women who have been diagnosed. gofundme.com/f/gigis-marath…
3/ Her ordeal was storybook amazing. She tried to run her 1st marathon in Feb. 2018 but at 20 miles she hit the wall HARD. A friend & I happened to be right where she passed out, holding her up her as she fell. She was incoherent but refused to stop trying. An ambulance took her.
Read 25 tweets
28 Aug
Showing how concepts change, here's a delightful Science News article from 1951: "Not just nine, but thousands of planets are known to circle our sun. Most of them are tiny bits of matter, ranging from several hundred miles across down to a city block." jstor.org/stable/pdf/392…
The 1st sentence: "There are thousands of known planets circling our sun. Yet it is still quite right to say the chief planets are Mercury, Venus, our own earth [sic], Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto...The other planets are little bits of matter...down to a city block."
Also (written 1951), "When a new planet is discovered...it is possible to compute its position...But these tiny planets are easily pulled out of their path by large planets, particularly giant Jupiter...[So they might] get lost or be mistaken for a new planet when spotted again."
Read 21 tweets
29 Jul
A few things to notice, to enhance your viewing pleasure. 1) Look for the white streaks af blowing dust from the bottom of the screen toward the end. Believe it or not, that dust is dark charcoal gray, although it looks white! /1
That is because dust has huge amounts of surface area so it reflects a lot of sunlight making it seem bright.

2) Notice how soft and fluffy the blowing dust looks. Soothing, right? In reality, it is super abrasive and is traveling 3.1 kilometers per second!
Yep, that’s how fast the dust goes. At that speed, it will complete a marathon (26.2 miles) in less than 14 seconds. And there is no air on the Moon to slow it down, so it actually *will* complete a marathon in less than 14 seconds. Over the next hour it will do 265 marathons.
Read 19 tweets
10 Jul
Great piece explaining why even cloth masks do *help* slow and prevent #COVID19.
2/ BTW, the science behind this — why even a cloth mask helps stop the spread of #coronavirus — is related to how NASA’s Viking spacecraft landed on Mars in 1975. Exactly the same fluid dynamics principle stopped the cratering of soil under the Mars landers as stops coronavirus.
3/ These were stationary landers with a robotic arm to get soil samples. They had no wheels, so wherever they landed, that was where the science would happen. They could not drive away from the rocket exhaust blast effects of landing to a more pristine location. (Mockup photo)
Read 12 tweets
21 May
SHORT THREAD: Lots of discussion in our family on how much #COVID19 risk to allow. This is forced on us by the zeitgeist, the political messaging, our kids' desire to meet up with friends, and even their friends' parents' level of risk taking🙄. So we created this process. /1
2/n This may not work for you, and it may have serious flaws. Use at your own risk. I welcome criticism.

First, when we decide on a particular risk, we use this chart. It is a typical risk analysis tool in aerospace and other industries. (Source: researchgate.net/figure/Example…)
3/n We want to stay in the green as much as possible. As a family we feel that we are now being forced to accept occasional events in the yellow, but we will try to minimize the number of times those events happen. We can probably still keep out of the purple and red.
Read 15 tweets

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