Hacker News Reader

> - 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

I think they used the diagonal of a hypothetical square Ohio: sqrt(355^2 + 355^2) ≈ 502 km.

View on HN

The classical definition of diameter of a set is "the largest possible distance between two points". So in this sense your square Ohio has a diameter of 502 km.

(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.)

If so, they passed up the opportunity to make another dumb Ohio joke:

"Ohio isn't actually square, though you wouldn't know that from talking to the inhabitants" or some such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com