30 Apr
2008
30 Apr
'08
10:30 a.m.
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Lemesee...
How come our solar system isn't a centrifuge?
It hasn't got a bottom: there's no pressure gradient.
Does the solar system order the planets in terms of density?
No! Saturn is less dense than water.
If not, what makes a centrifuge different from the solar system? I.e., at what densities of planetary matter would things start working differently?
Well, you'd need a bottom for the system: a ringworld against which the matter could be thrown so that there'd be nonzero pressure. The density of matter required for a stable ringworld is somewhere around neutronium, I think. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com