That's the joke.
There are fewer hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water than there are fingers on my hand.
Check and mate.
Ken M made a similar joke a while back right?
Obligatory "what about Jupiter"
Okay, I'll bite. "what about it?"
It's a Y-class brown dwarf star. Saturn likely is as well.
Today, the International Astronomical Union places the dividing line between brown dwarfs and planets at 13 Jupiter masses. This is the minimum mass required to ignite deuterium fusion.
And if you want more, check out what I said last time this meme was posted.
As someone who worked as an astrophysicist for 9 years, I assure you that the question of "what is a planet?" is a nuanced discussion with a lot of diverse opinions and no clear answer that gets endlessly debated by students as they learn that these definitions aren't as cut and dry as irresponsible science communicators made it seem during the disastrous and highly politically motivated demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet.
IAU is well known for coming up with shitty arbitrary classifications about nomenclature that many astronomers don't agree with. They are wrong here because they don't take into account post-Cassini/Juno understanding of gas giant morphology. The IAU definition is outdated and highly misleading.
Copied from another reply I gave in this thread:
I've seen 13 MJ argued as a boundary, but it's selected somewhat arbitrarily and based around idealized models of Deuterium fusion, which has never been observed, and which is a process these brown dwarves would only undergo for a brief flash in their early life. Deuterium isn't abundant enough for its fusion to significantly alter the stellar morphology that has already become established for objects larger than Saturn. Saturn is our solarsystem's example of an object that does not fit cleanly into one side or the other of a mass-based binary classification scheme for determining a hard boundary between "planet" and "star". To understand what is a planet vs what is a star, study Saturn.
Ok, that's interesting! I didn't realize there was controversy around this definition.
The planet definition that excluded pluto was decided upon at the end of an IAU conference after most planetary scientists had left. As a result, only dynamicists are happy with it. Planetary geologists in particular HATE it and have always vocally pushed back.
I'd say Jupiter would need to be about 3 times massive to count as one. And more realistically around 10ish.
Based on what criteria?
Jupiter is large enough for the hydrogen to become a plasma and dissolve the rocky "planetary" core that was once at the center. Morphologically, it has passed the transition from planet to star. Saturn appears to be somewhere along that transition and is harder to cleanly classify.
Morphologically, Jupiter is a star.
I've seen 13 MJ argued as a boundary, but it's selected somewhat arbitrarily and based around idealized models of Deuterium fusion, which has never been observed, and which is a process these brown dwarves would only undergo for a brief flash in their early life. Deuterium isn't abundant enough for its fusion to significantly alter the stellar morphology that has already become established for objects larger than Saturn. Saturn is our solarsystem's example of an object that does not fit cleanly into one side or the other of a mass-based binary classification scheme for determining a hard boundary between "planet" and "star". To understand what is a planet vs what is a star, study Saturn.
Infeel like this gets reposted here at least once a month, but this one has a different t pic, and way more likes
Me: That doesn't seem right. OH. Oh, I am stupid.
*OH~2~
I am impressed by how clever that was. Well done.
It's almost impossible to see the last two words because your brain is already reeling from the rest of the statement. It took me a few tries to finally parse it.
Not stupid. Our brain can just get tripped up sometimes and read what it expects to read instead of what's really there. The sad part is that there are educated people in the US even today that would be surprised or even argue against you if you stated the other version (more atoms in a glass than in our galaxy). Our science education is woefully lacking now.
What blew me away that I learned not too long ago is the notion that if the galaxy was the size of the US, our solar system would be the size of a fingerprint. Try to even visualize that. (reference is the Epic Spaceman YT channel)
We had a young, hippy science teacher through 70s grade school. Looking back, that woman made more impact on my life than any other teacher.
Every year, every fucking year, she'd start with the difference in fact and opinion. "Yeah, I get it already. Can we move on?" Apparently not many others got that bit of education.
She taught the scientific method and how it works, she taught how to experiment, how to measure. I still set a beaker down and wait for it to settle before moving on. And I'm not in science!
NGL our solar system being the size of a finger print is (somehow) bigger than I expected.
Another fun size thing I heard recently was that if an atom were the size of a football stadium then the nucleus would be the size of a pea.
Click here if you don't understand
There is only one star in our solar system - the Sun.
And if you somehow still don't get it, click here
Meanwhile, there are two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule - H~2~O
If you're still having trouble, click here
2 is greater than 1
And if all of this continues to elude you, click here
You just lost The Game^TM^.
There are more memes estimating the size of the universe than there are stars in the galaxy.
I skipped reading the word stars, and I thought it was deliberately wrong to rile people up.
Most people have more balls than there are stars in our solar system.
Wait, are you counting ovaries?
The average human has somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 testicles.
Late edit: I was not sober when I wrote this and I definitely did the math wrong.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
