> Enceladus is far smaller than the Jovian ocean worlds, roughly the size of Ohio
Why not just say 'has a diameter of about 500 km'? The propensity of astronomers to compare diameters of a small spherical object to a surface patch of a much larger spherical object is intriguing. Similar things happen with 'the Great Red Spot is about two Earths wide'.
> But it is a much more exciting place than Ohio, and far more livable.
Maybe just an excuse to make a joke about Ohio.
What would size here refer to surface area? Or diameter? Or circumfence?
If the article said "500km", someone in the comments would go "that's about as wide as Germany!" or similar.
And, since it was km -> "state size", it was almost certainly for the American audience, since they would have used something like the size of Germany for a European, or "twice the size of South Korea" or something.
You said these comparisons are made to make things real or relatable; I personally would expect more out of my audience and give them the magnitude and units directly. I'm not writing for a tabloid; having a strong grounding in units understanding without needing to relate to daily phenomena is in my view critical to not making apparently trivial mistakes that can potentially lead to horrible disasters.
Although, as it turns out, "orbiter" was a poor choice of name.
This is moderately misleading in some ways, but illustrative enough and also technically valid if somebody wants to model it accurately.
I think that this is more than moderately misleading, because it is ambiguous:
- if they meant "diameter is similar to Ohio dimensions", they are a little bit off, because Ohio is about 355*355 km and Enceladus diameter is around 500km
- if they meant surface area, then they are very off, because Ohio is 116,096 km^2 while Enceladus is about 800,000 km^2. In this case it would be more accurate to say that it is bigger then Texas, but smaller than Alaska (if we want to use US states for comparison)
I think they used the diagonal of a hypothetical square Ohio: sqrt(355^2 + 355^2) ≈ 502 km.
"Ohio isn't actually square, though you wouldn't know that from talking to the inhabitants" or some such.
(It is still misleading to compare it to the diameter of an almost-spherical object, I agree. Especially because moving on the surface of a sphere it takes much longer than 502 km to walk from one point to the antipodal one.)
I don't have a concrete proof, just a gut feeling, but I think that this kind of comparisons are much more common in texts written by Americans and for Americans than in any other culture, that's why:
> There's a meme about "Americans will use anything but the metric system" when describing buildings as "100 school buses back to back" or "3 football fields"
Those filthy new worlders and their propensity to make technical writing parsable by the unwashed masses. If the masses want to understand science they should just go to Oxford or whatever.
> make technical writing parsable by the unwashed masses
> If the masses want to understand science they should just go to Oxford
This is a bad strawman. I learnt scientific notation in secondary school. I expect most educated people to understand what is meant by '1.5 × 10^8 km' in an instant. If they don't, then honestly, skill issue, and it is a big indictment of their parent country's education system.