What is the difference between a moon and a planet?
Trick question! According to scientific definitions, there often isn’t much of a difference at all.
That might seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. And some of those similarities you can see with your own eyes. If you look at a picture of Venus and a picture of Jupiter’s moon Io next to each other, they look pretty much indistinguishable.
But it’s not just looks. Rocky composition, general size, orbital behaviors—a lot of those qualities can be the same on both planets and moons. And on the flip side, they can be very different between planets. For instance, our little rocky Earth is a lot more like the Moon than it is, say, Saturn or Uranus.
Watch Pop Mech’s Jackie Appel discuss these definitions in more detail, nail down what a planet really is, and decide if there’s a fundamental difference between planets and moons at all.
As it turns out, in the vast chaos that is our cosmos, a lot of objects wind up being pretty similar. But in our constant search for understanding, we humans have to decide where to draw our lines.
See the full episode and learn more about why we call some round, rocky, celestial bodies “moons” and others “planets.” And don’t forget to check out the rest of our show Pop Mech Explains the Universe, where we explore other fascinating space stories just like this one.
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