Golf's About To Get A Bit More Expensive

Also, people died.

That's the general situation in Taiwan after an explosion and fire at Launch Technologies, a golf ball manufacturer that produces golf balls by contract for companies such as Callaway, TaylorMade, and Bridgestone. The incident is responsible for at least 9 deaths and 100 injuries.

But we're golfers here, and clearly the most important issue is how this will affect the prices of golf balls. While I'm no economist, Launch Technologies was previously responsible for producing about 20% of the world's golf balls, and removing one-fifth of the total supply while demand remains the same will probably result in higher prices. Which is great, because golf balls weren't already absurdly expensive. I love spending $50 on golf balls that end up lost in a forest off the third fairway. Now it'll be $60, and this time I'll hit them into the pond next to the fifth green. Excellent.

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.