How Dense Would the Little Prince's Planet be?
Keywords:
Book, Physics, Planetary Physics, Gravity/orbits, Material properties, The Little PrinceAbstract
In the eponymous book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the Little Prince claims he has watched 44 sunsets in a day. In this paper, this piece of information is used to determine his planet's radius, mass, volume, and density. Using a value of 24 min per sunset, it was estimated that the Little Prince’s planet radius, mass, volume, and density are 5625.60 m, 4.65x1018 kg, 7.458x1011 m3 and 6.235x106 kg m-3 respectively. This would mean that the Little Prince’s planet is 276 times denser that Osmium, the densest element on Earth.
References
Saint-Exupéry, A. & Howard, R., The Little Prince (HMH Books), Chapter 6.
Saint-Exupéry, A. & Howard, R., The Little Prince (HMH Books), Chapter 5.
The United States Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (2011) Rise, Set, and Twilight Definitions. [Online]. Available at: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/RST_defs.php [Accessed: 17 January 2017]
Saint-Exupéry, A. & Howard, R., The Little Prince (HMH Books), Chapter 2.
Sutherland, D. (1997) The development of mature gait, Gait & Posture, 6(2), pp.163-170.
Williams, D. R. (2016) Earth Fact Sheet. [Online]. Available at: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html [Accessed: 2 March 2017].
Weast, R. C., Astle, M. J., & Beyer, W. H., (1989) CRC handbook of chemistry and physics 69th Edition. CRC press Boca Raton, FL, pp.4-79.
Saint-Exupéry, A. & Howard, R., The Little Prince (HMH Books), Chapter 4.
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