How Old Are You on Neptune?
- Print
- 9/14/2011 |
- 10:00 am
We tend to think of a year -- or any unit of time -- as a tangible, concrete thing. But the truth is not so black and white.
If you stop and think about it, a year is really just a form of measurement. Years, days, hours, minutes... these are all just specific ways of measuring and identifying time. We describe our lives in increments of years in the same way that a carpenter might describe the length of a wood plank in centimeters. It's a universally agreed-upon form of measurement that allows us all to work within the same frame of reference.
The thing about time, however, is that it's pinned to some very real forces of nature. A day is the length of time it takes for our planet to rotate fully on its axis, and a year is the length of time it takes us to orbit the sun. For us here on Earth, a year is roughly 365 days -- hence we classify each year by the passing of 365 days, except in leap years, when that number is nudged up to 366.
But because other planets have much different orbital patterns around the sun, their years are much different than ours. For instance, Jupiter, with its wide orbital path, only circles the sun once for every 11.86 Earth years. Mercury, by contrast, orbits the sun once every 88 Earth days.
So with all of that in mind, we present to you this fun little tool, which will tell you how old you would be if you lived on any of the other planets. Galahad author Dom Testa, for example, would only be 1.69 years old on Saturn! How old would you be on your favorite planet?
And when you're done playing with that, you can also see how much you'd weigh on other planets. Ha!
* * * * *
