Say Hello To The Golf Ball Asteroid

Credit: ESO/Vernazza et al.

When it comes to asteroids, Pallas is a pretty impressive one. It was the second asteroid discovered and is the third largest overall, behind only Ceres and Vesta. You would think we'd have gotten a decent picture of the thing before now, but Pallas has a very inclined and eccentric orbit, making it an extremely difficult task to shoot a space probe at it. So difficult that the first detailed images of the asteroid had to be taken from Earth.

In the research, published in Nature Astronomy, the scientists who took the images called Pallas the "golf ball asteroid," because the surface is so cratered it does bear a noticeable resemblance to a golf ball. And that made me curious about something: If someone wanted to use Pallas as a golf ball, how tall would they have to be? It's time for a bit of math.

A golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter, and I'm 75 inches tall. Pallas is 339 miles in diameter, so in order for the scale to be the same, our interplanetary golfer would have to be 15,133 miles high. That's almost twice the diameter of the Earth. No wonder Pallas has such a strange orbit, someone must have hit one crazy slice.