I'm a huge fan of Neil Tyson and have been watching his stuff a lot recently, but he mentioned how actually small Pluto is.
It's radius is only 738.4 miles, meaning that from point to point, it's only 1476.8 miles across.
To put this into perspective, Texas (From the furthest distance across, point to point) is 801 miles.
Meaning, Texas is half the size of Pluto. This blew my fucking mind on how small that little fella is.
Texas is a 2D concept stretched across a surface. Pluto is a nearly spherical 3D object. In terms of surface area, you could fit 25.5 instances of Texas on Pluto. A better comparison would be Earth's Moon, another nearly spherical 3D object with a radius of 1079 miles.
For more fun, take a look at how different Pluto's orbit is compared to those of the planets:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/pluto/wp-content/uploads/sites/253/2016/07/nh-line-of-nodes.png
Anyone calling pluto a planet is placing sentimentality over science.
You hear about Pluto?
That's messed up.
Pluto?
What's that? Some sort of comet or something?
Yep. Even that small, Pluto might still have got a planet designation if not for Charon's relative mass. Charon is large, bigger than the dwarf planet Ceres, and because of that mass, Pluto and Charon orbit each other. It's more like a binary dwarf planet system than the classic planet- moon system.
You need to brush up on your math, Pluto is a sphere so it's surface area = 4(pi)r^2. It's surface area is over 20 times bigger than Texas. Russia however has a similar surface area to Pluto.
