Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat is the tallest mountain in the solar system?
Where is the biggest, tallest or widest mountain in the Solar System? Hint: it's not on any planet.
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Hey, Jorgey, you like the mountains, don't you?
I used to drink mountain do Yeah?
I mean do you like climbing mountains?
Oh, climbing? I like skiing and hiking, yeah, and I like looking at great views.
All right, So then what's the tallest mountain you ever summitted?
I've been to the top of El Capitan and jo seventy.
How tall is that?
That was like three thousand, three thousand feet, I think.
And I bet that felt like a bit crazy, like a little extreme.
It was pretty pretty amazing. I mean I was exhausted and the views were amazing. You know, everything looks so small.
Well, what if I told you that they were taller mountains out there?
I mean, like Everest.
Oh no, that's like a baby mountain. I'm talking much much taller mountains.
So they taste as good as mountain dew. Hi am Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi I'm Dana Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm learning how to live stream.
And Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the university production of iHeartRadio, in which.
We take a tour of everything out there in the universe. Everything crazy, everything fast, everything slow, everything hot, everything dense, Everything that you want to know about the universe, explained in a way that hopefully makes sense and entertains here.
That's right. We take a look at the everyday life, the physics of the every day, and we also look at the extremes of the universe, although the biggest, the brightest, the loudest, the craziest things out there in the universe and bring it to you here on this podcast.
Because one of my favorite things about the universe is that it is so extreme. Here life on Earth is actually pretty calm and slow and comfortable. But out there in the universe, things are exploding, things are hot, things are dense. There is crazy stuff happening out there, and that's how we learn about the universe. We go to those places where crazy things happen, and that shows us what is possible in the universe.
Although thankfully we don't live in one of those crazy thankfully, right we Earth is pretty calm, I think, well, not these days, definitely not these days, but in general, in a cosmic sense, we are in a pretty quiet part of the Solar System.
And you'd rather live in a calm place. You don't want to have a vacation home on a neutron star.
I feel like life is pretty exciting enough already as it is. I don't think I need more mountain to extremeness.
I bet if they offered those tours of neutron stars ski down a slope on the mountains of Io, people would.
Definitely do it. Yeah, the ski level would take a lot a long time, though.
Well, we have a series of podcasts we've been really enjoying all about the extremes of the universe. We did the hottest place, the coldest place, the biggest thing. What else did we do?
Did the emptiest thing, the brightest things, did the biggest explosions in the universe. There's a lot of sts out there in the universe, you know, and it's interesting to think that there is sort of a maximum of these things. You know, there is a maximum brightness, there is a maximum emptiness, there is a maximum size of things.
Yeah. And each of these was fun to explore, and each one taught us a little bit of physics along the way while hopefully educating you about all the crazy stuff that's happening in the universe.
Yeah.
And like you said, I think it's interesting because it really kind of pushes your brain a little bit to think beyond sort of what is around us, or to try to wrap your head around things that are that big or that bright or that small. I think we've done smallest.
Too, right, Yeah, Well, we don't know what the smallest thing is, right, it's the smallest thing so far.
We've done the funniest far joke, the biggest space banana. Oh wait, that that's in the queue for later, got it.
That's right. Tease the audience with that one. But I think each of these teaches us something because if you learn what's the dagest possible thing or the smallest thing and the hottest thing, it shows you what the universe can do, and I think that that's what's exciting, is prying the universe open and figuring out what's possible, what's out there, and also just you know, pulling ourselves out of our little cosmic neighborhood and realizing that most of the universe is pretty different from the kind of stuff that we experience.
That's right. So today on the podcast, we'll be talking about once such extreme in the universe as part of our Extreme Universe series. And so today we're talking about something that I think everyone is maybe probably familiar with it. I think we can all see one maybe when we look outside our windows every day.
I hope. So it's something that I certainly enjoy. I've always lived near one of these things, or in one of these things, or I guess on one of these things. I started to imagine not having one around.
You haven't lived under one, you haven't lived under one.
That's where I'm going to retire. Yeah, that's my retirement plan.
If things get any worse, that's where you're headed. The nearest bunker.
Yeah.
But today in the podcast, we'll be asking the question, what is the biggest mountain in the Solar System, the biggest or the tallest, Daniel, Yeah.
I was going to ask you are we doing biggest or tallest? Like do you want to know where's the highest point sort of base to peak or the highest point above sea level or like the most stuff underneath the peak? Like a really not very tall mountain but really wide would that count?
Or like if you had a really thin but tall mountain, would that be the biggest?
Well from a skiing point of view, you definitely would be for tall and thin to short and fat, right, Oh man, I mean I don't want to be all mountain body image stuff over here, but you know when it comes to skiing, there is a difference.
Yeah, well I think you know, I think aren't they sort of the same? I mean, if you think about mountains, they all have sort of the same shape, right, so this triangular shape you don't see like round mountains or like square mountains, or like tall and skinny mountains. They're all sort of triangular shapes. So aren't they the same thing? Like asking the tallest means asking also the biggest in terms of masks.
I think yes, if all mountains were the same shape, then you're right, the tallest would be the biggest, but not an expert in geology, but having done a tiny bit of research for this podcast, I learned that they're not actually all the same shape.
There are round mountains, there are square mountains.
There are tall and thin, and there are shorter and fatter mountains. Like we'll talk about it, but like volcanic mountains can be pretty flat, and also depending on the amount of gravity, the shape of volcanic mountain vari Yeah.
I think there's a formula for like the slope of a mountain depends on what the rocks are made out of, and then also the gravity, because if you have a lot of gravity, it'll'll flatten the mountains, and you have less gravity, they'll be bigger, yeah, steeper.
Yep. So if you're a booster for one particular mountain you think should be champion, you might have, you know, a bone to pick at the end after we declare our champion.
Okay, but to the on the podcast, I guess you're you're using tallest like distance between the base of it to the peak of it.
I think base to peak is the best measurement. It depends what you want in a mountain. If what you want is an amazing view, then you really want to be sort of highest point above sea level. But imagine like a really big mountain that's like the size of the whole planet. You're not going to get a great view if you just sort of walk to the top of that thing. So really what you want is base to peak, right, You want to be above everything else around you, so you get a green view.
I see, Well, we'll give you the best perspective. Yeah, exactly, Run for the views.
Run for the views. Yeah. But there's one more caveat which is what if part of the mountain is underwater, Like imagine underwater mountain with only a very tip sticking out.
Or what if it's like cloud cover it. I'll do the very tip, you know, then you can't see very much. You see a little.
Tip, then you get no views at all if you're standing in your clouds. So, as usual, the deeper we dive into a topic, the more we discover it's funny.
Yeah, and the more board the audience as we keep on discussing the definition of a mountain. But for the podcast, we're just gonna go with you know, I guess the base is what we defined. The base just where it stops being a mountain. Yeah, and other mountains.
Oh man, you want to start a whole other conversation about where a mountain ends. Jeez, and the whole Earth is one mountain. I don't know.
There you go, The Sun is a mountain, the Milky Way is a mountain.
Yeah, but you might be surprised also to learn where the highest mountain is in the Solar system.
That's right, And so that's the question we'll be asking today is what is the tallest I will go with tallest what is the tallest mountain in the Solar system? By which I mean really sort of what's the biggest one, because it's really just about size and impressiveness, and I don't know for me the word tallest doesn't it convey that cud level impressiveness. So we're asking what is the tallest.
What is the most confusing podcast in the Solar system?
What is the tallest mountain in the Solar system? And you might be surprised it's not here on Earth, it's not even on Mars even or Jupiter. And so we'll get to the answer here at the end of the podcast. But first we were wondering how knowledgeable people are about mountains in the Solar system, and if people knew where is the tallest mountain in the Solar system?
So I walked around campus that you see Irvine before it was shut down, and I asked people where was the tallest mountain in the Solar System? And none of them more, hey, you'll notice gave me the flag that you just gave me. None of them said, well, do you mean biggest or tallest? I want a clear definition. They all understood what I meant.
Well, they are you see Irvine students, he.
Said, in the most positive complementary way possible.
And that's right. Yeah, And so people had opinions about this. Think about it for a second. If someone asked you where you thought the tallest mountain in the Solar system is, what would you say?
Mount Everest?
Mount Everest. There's no bigger mountains somewhere else in the Solar system. Ah, maybe somewhere in Jupiter.
I don't know. Probably not on Earth, but it might be.
I'm assuming that what planet do you think is likely to have bigger mountains?
All right? Cool?
The biggest mountain in the Solar System? Oh, that's a hard question. I don't know if I could say for sure. I'm gonna assume that it's not on Earth. That's probably on a separate planet within our Solar system.
Yeah, So which which planet you think is most likely to have the biggest mountains?
Mm hmm, I'm going to say Mars Mars. Yeah, I would assume based on how gaseous some of the larger plant and it's our.
I'm not sure.
In terms of the planets that are closest to the Sun, I guess I really don't know a ton about planets in general.
Mars, right, for sure, I heard it somewhere.
But does it make sense to you that Mars is the biggest mountain given that it's like tectonically not active.
Uh, I'm not totally sure, all right, I guess I always just thought, even if it has like less tectonic activity, Mars is a little smaller than Earth.
So I guess conceivably, I don't know.
Like in the Earth, all right, if you have to guess, now, ever, in.
The Mars, why do you say Mars?
I know there's I know, the highest mountain of the Ars Olympics or something.
I forgot the name.
All right, I'll a lot of great guesses, I mean, know what he said, like Mount Trasta in California. People went to other planets right away. They're like, it's on Mars, it's on Jupiter. It's Mount Everest.
Yeah, what do you think? What do you think of the Jupiter? Answer? That one puzzled me a little bit, Like how do you imagine a mountain on Jupiter?
Well, I imagine a triangular shaped.
Is that how you start everything? Physicists start everything with a spear? Engineers start everything with a triangle. No, like Jupiter, Like I don't. It doesn't have a surface. You can't really have mountains. It's not a rocky planet. I was wondering what was going through their minds as they were saying Jupiter are they imagining?
I mean, Jupiter is mostly a gas planet.
Yeah, I mean it's got you know, gas, and then like metallic hydrogen oceans, and then the very core. There might be something rocky which could I guess have features on it, But that's not really a mountain the way we're thinking about it.
Isn't the core made out of like frozen gas or like you said, metallic gas. Can you have mountains on those?
Yeah?
I suppose you could, And I think there might even be some rock and some ice there in the core Jupiter. But is that really a mountain? I mean, if it's under an ocean of liquid hydrogen.
Like, well, I guess if it's underwater, you know, just regular water here on Earth, do you still consider it a mountain?
Yes, definitely.
Okay, so a mountain could be covered in liquid.
Could be covered liquid. I see where you're going with this. I'm not sure that this is where those people were going though. I think they were just like, Jupiter is big, therefore biggest mountains.
Oh right, They're like, what's the biggest planet, Surely that must have the biggest mountain.
Exactly. I think that's what they were doing.
Yeah, well that makes sense. And so let's get into this question of what is the tallest mountain in the Solar System? And so, first of what makes a tall mountain? Daniels. So it turns out, what's the recipe for making a mountain? At rockster four minute? Into a triangular shape?
You start with your triangle cookie cut, I think exactly. You get your triangle shape, pan out. No, it turns out there are three ways to make a mountain. Right you are designing your planet and you want a big mountain, there's three techniques you can use. And the first one is probably the one people are most familiar with, and that's just have tectonic Right. That means you got these big plates of earth or whatever your mountain is called, banging around and slamming into each other and pushing against each other. And where they push, they tend to like ride up on top of each other, and then you get mountains like your famous Himalayas.
Oh, that's how the Himalayas reformed, Like two giant plates and they crash and what comes up is the mountain.
Yeah, India basically backed up into China and the result is the Himalayas. I'm not saying whose fault it is, you know, but.
They exchanged phone numbers, insurance information, and they're like, oh, look what we made.
China was right there. India just like ran right into it. I mean, I know who I'm who I'm siding with on on that conflict.
And so that's one way to make mountains is having plates crash into each other. But you can also make them other ways, right.
Yeah, exactly. You can also build up a mountain by spewing up magma from underneath the earth. Like you get a crack and the magma spews up, you get a volcano. The lava comes out and it builds up a mountain. And that's like slowly deposit lava, layer after layer after layer, and it adds up and eventually you get a mountain. You know, like Hawaii. Hawaii exists. It's basically the tip of a mountain that starts at the bottom of the ocean.
Oh you can. You can grow a mountain.
Too, exactly. It's like a chia pet.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
And you know, there's lots of famous volcanic mountains, you know, like Mountain Vesuvius. Right, it's a mountain and it's there because it's been depositing lava and building itself up year after year. And it's also interesting, like the tectonic ones, they build up very gradually and then they get worn down by the weather and so they have some sort of life cycle where they get taller and taller and taller, and they're pointy and then they get sort of softer and roundy. Like you can tell how old a mountain ranges by how sharp and craggy it is. Like the rocky mountains are pretty young, whereas the smoky mountains in the Eastern United States are kind of old because they're all like smoothed over on the top.
From like wind or just from like the laps, know.
From like wind and rain. Yeah, weather man, Oh wow, Yeah, they just get worn down. They're old and old and busted. And the Rockies are the hot new mountains. But the volcanic mountains they're dynamic, right, Like they just keep adding more layers.
You know.
It's like that guy who keeps putting new rooms in his house.
But they also collapse, right because they like sometimes doesn't the lava create like cavities underneath and then they end up collapsing.
Yeah, they're unstable in totally different ways. And so like the life cycle of these tectonic ones and the volcanic ones are pretty different.
Okay, cool, And so what are some other ways we can make mouns?
All right? So then the last one is sort of my favorite way, which.
Is you have is it aliens?
Aliens could probably build mountains. Man, Now we have four ways?
You go, what can aliens do?
No, this one is cool because it's so dramatic, Like this one happens when you have a big cosmic impact, like you have a huge crater, you know, like a big asteroid hits a planet and it creates a big collision and that can lead to mountains.
But wait, I would imagine it just makes a big hole. How can it make a mountain unless you like create a hole and then that you can count that as the base of where does the rock from the hole go up, up, up and out?
Well, there's that, but where does the rock from the hole go up and out and it comes back down? And the idea is that, like it creates often mountains along the rim. Like if you look up at a picture of meteor crater, that big meteor crater in Arizona, you'll see that it has a rim, and that rim is raised up not just above the base of the crater, but also relative to the ground near it.
Oh right, So I guess the meteor or something falls or the Adians crash land.
Aliens land, they're really big ship yeeah.
And then it pushes everything out And that's another way to create a mountain, because you're pushing earth.
Yeah, And it's sort of weird, like on one hand, you're throwing rocks up into the air and that ejecta sort of land and they can pile up but also there's some sort of compression wave. Because you look at some of these mountains, and we'll talk about them, they're pretty crazy. They're really sharp, and some of these really big they have like a secondary ring around it, like you have the first ring of the very edge of the crater, and then some of them have like multiple rings around them, and scientists don't understand it. It's like controversial. Actually reached out to a friend of mine who's a planetary scientist, and he said, the formation of these multiple rings is controversial, but there's some thought that they represent the imprints of seismic waves that propagate out from the impact point.
Oh so just like the shock wave. Yeah, it just somehow like pops mountains.
Up and then they freeze in place. Yeah.
Oh Wowol, it's pretty crazy.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
I think you forgot aliens making snow angels giant aliens lying down.
I didn't forget it. I thought of it and rejected, Okay, this is a science podcast and not Jorge make stuff up.
Did you actually consider it?
I thought, will suggest this. I have to have a response.
Right, where are your references? Daniel? Prove to me that it's not possible.
Okay, I'll go do the experiment.
All right, Well, let's get into now, what is the tallest mountain in the Solar System? Is it here on Earth? Is it on Jupiter? Is it on Mars? But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Dania, we're talking about the tallest and or the biggest mountains in the Solar System, and so I think we should maybe start here on Earth. What do you think since we were here.
I was before I was kidnapped by the Aliens and forced to broadcast this podcast from their orbiting mother ship.
You'd be sponsored by the mountain dew of Venus.
That's right, the extreme Aliens, well even if we begin here on Earth, there's already something of a controversy about what's the tallest mountain on Earth?
Really, you mean scientists can't agree on stuff?
Well, I think it's actually engineers debating the details of definitions, because your go to answer is Mount Everest. Right, it's like eight point eight kilometers above sea level. It's the highest point on Earth. Right, highest point above sea level. And that's a famous mountain. It's beautiful, lots of people have died trying to climb in. It's totally extreme. Guess its props and as we said.
Before, the Mount Everest of mountains.
It's the Mount Everest of Mount Everests and it's a tectonic one, right, it comes. It's part of this incredible chain of mountains in the Himalayas.
Oh really wow? And it was quite a collie India into China.
I think that was actually still happening. Like I think Mount Everest is getting taller every year.
Wow, that's that true.
Yeah, it actually grows about a quarter inch every year. And that's because this slow motion collision between India and China is still happening, and so India like hasn't stopped it ran right into China, and it's just like pressed on the gas pedal and it's just pushing and pushing and pushing, and so this rocket just going up and up and up.
But wait, isn't sea levels also going up? So isn't that erasing some of that callness?
That is a very good point. Climate change is going to bring down Mount Everest. Wow, that's maybe the least important consequence.
Of climate change, unfortunately.
But there's another contender, right, There's another contender, which is Monukea. Monukeaa is a volcanic mountain in the Pacific and it's only four point two kilometers of a sea level, but that's because most of it's underwater. If you went from the tip of Monukea down to the base at the bottom of the ocean floor, that's more than ten colors.
Wow.
So that's that's a whole kilometer and a half bigger than Mount ever.
I know it like would look down in Mount Everest and laugh at how pathetic it is.
It's Hawaiian, so it's probably pretty chill.
It would be pretty friendly to.
Goddess it's the goddess of Lavas. It would probably be you know, be like hey.
Yeah, so I bet Hawaiians out there think of mono Keaa as the tallest mountain or the biggest mountain. Also, it's definitely wider, like these volcanic mountains tend to be pretty wide because the lava doesn't just pile up in one spot, right, it flows.
So but talk going back to our definition, it would be the biggest mountain, right because it doesn't matter if it's underwater or partly underwater or partly under clouds. We're talking like based to peak.
Based to peak, monokea hands down biggest mountain on Earth.
Okay, so that's here on Earth. That's the biggest mountain we have here on Earth. It's bigger than anything else. There's no bigger feature on this planet.
On this planet. That's right. That's the best we could do.
All right.
Then, now let's go into other planets in this Solar system and let's start. I guess with the with the one plus it's of the Sun. What's going on in Mercury? What's the How big are the mountains in Mercury?
So Mercury is not that impressive. It's a small little planet and it doesn't have like tectonic activity or crazy volcanoes. But it is impacted a lot. So these huge rocks hit Mercury and create these features. And there's this one feature on Mercury. It's an enormous impact and it's called the colorous Montess and it has these rings around the edge of it that are three kilometers above the planets.
Oh, I guess there's no sea level in Mercury. There is just third levels.
No sea level. Yeah, exactly, it's what we're just doing basic peak, right, So sea levels are relevant, so base to peak. This thing that rings this crater is three kilometers. It's sort of hard to imagine. It's like these sharp spikes that are ringing around this crater, and it's it's pretty high. You know, this is not a little bump three kilometers there is nothing to sneeze.
It's pretty tall. It's like as big as Mount Kaere above sea.
Level, almost as high above sea level as Manicaea is. Yeah, and it's much narrower. These impact mountains or these impact features, whatever you want to call them, are much narrower because they come from these explosions. They're more like shards, right, they're not built up slowly.
Oh, they're more dramatic.
Yes, they're very dramatic.
All right, So that's Mery Creed. What about Venus? What does ves have?
Venus is pretty impressive. It has tectonic activity, and its tallest mountain is called the scaty Monds and it's six and a half kilometers high, so it doesn't match Mount Everest. And it's a tectonic mountain, so it's formed by you know, crushing together of these plates. But the weirdest thing about this mountain is Venus's atmosphere. Right. Remember, Venus is really weird. And people think that Venus once looked like Earth that at once had a nice tempered climate and maybe even oceans, and then it was hit by a huge meteor that caused basically climate change and a runaway greenhouse effect. They heated it up, and now the atmosphere is crazy and it's like nine hundred degrees on the surface of Venus.
Wow.
And so the surface of this mountain is covered in metallic snow flakes of lead that have precipitated italic lead. Snow snow made of flakes of lead. Yeah, like now talk about extreme ski.
Yeah, that's like a quadruple black diamond right there with a couple of crossbones just to make sure you don't ski on those.
Yeah, it's a lead diamond. And it's hard to understand like the weather on the surface, because not only is it really hot so you imagine, know this stuff would just melt, it's also really high pressure, so the phase diagrams are pretty complicated, so you can get stuff that's solid at higher temperatures than it would be here on Earth because of the pressure.
Oh I see, it's not just hot nine hundred degrees, it's also super high.
Pressure, really high pressure. So yeah, not a good place. I do not recommend.
Skiing on Venus, that castle, that ski vacation.
Yeah, everything we've sent to the surface of Venus like has lasted for you know, minutes and then been crushed hushed.
Yeah, because of the pressure. All right, but still that's a pretty big on six point four kilometers and it's time. We know it's tectonic because you can see the plates on Venus kind of coming together or they're just not in the form of a ring.
They're not in the form of a ring, and it doesn't look like volcanic and so they've deduced from looking at the surface of Venus that there's tectonic activity. I don't know if they know exactly where the edges of those plates are, but this definitely looks like a tectonic mountain.
Well, it's interesting to think that Earth has bigger mountains than all of these other planets so far.
Yeah, and remember that Earth is bigger than Mercury, right, so you'd expect a bigger planet to have larger features, just sort of like proportionally. And Earth is about the same size as Venus. It's pretty close, and so you expect them to be about the same size. And hey, you know, it's not far off. So I understand why you would imagine a bigger planet would have bigger mountains. But it's actually sort of the opposite later when we get to Mars, which is confusing.
So having a bigger planet doesn't mean a bigger.
Mountains, not necessarily. How about tallest mountains, triangulist mountains.
Square mountains? All right, Well, it takes us to somewhere else in the Solar System. Where else can we find big mountains? Apparently there we can have mounts, not just in planets. We can also have a moon moons.
Yeah, we can have them on the moons. So our moon has a pretty impressive feature. It's Mons Huygens and it's five and a half kilometers high from an impact almost four billion years ago, some huge thing hit it that was like two hundred and fifty kilometers wide, And so you have this crazy crater with edges of it that have these features of it that are almost six kilometers up.
Well, and you can see him in a ring. Can you see him from earth or is it on the other side of the moon.
You can see them from Earth and can study them in a telescope, and so they're pretty impressive.
Cool, and it's it's our moon. Is not the only moon with mountains.
That's right, And they get harder and harder to pronounce, and as you get further out.
Yes, I never thought of it. Is does our moon have a name or is it just the moon?
Our moon is called Luna and our sun is called soul en Espanola.
Did you just make that up? I know that it's Soul has the name of our sun, but I never heard our moon called Luna.
No, it's called Luna. Check it nice. But the moon Io has a feature called move Boyu Salmonts and it's eighteen kilometers high. What, yes, eighteen kilometers so it like blows away Mount Everest, blows away Monacave.
So I was a moon of what Jupiter, Saturn.
Io was a moon of Jupiter, and it's the most volcanically active world in the whole Solar system. So it's got a lot of stuff going.
On, the most volcanically active.
Volcanoes Everywhere's a lot of stuff going on on the inside of Io, and that also leads to tectonic activity. And so this thing is actually a tectonic mountain on Io. And it's eighteen kilometers high. So that's pretty impressive.
It's like twice the height of Mount Evers.
Yeah, and I was pretty impressed until I started reading about the moons of Saturn. Now there's one moon of Saturn called Yapoitis, and this one is so weird. It's got a ridge all the way around the equator that's twenty kilometers high. It looks sort of like a like a walnut, you know, like a spherical object with a ring around the edge of it.
Belt like it has a belt. Yeah, it's like a belt like love handles. Like love handles.
Maybe it ate a bunch of other.
Moons and it goes all the way around.
It goes three quarters of the way around, three quarters of the way around. Nobody understands it, nobody knows why, nobody knows how.
Like somebody squished the planet, like took it from top to bottom and it squished and it like bulged out mountains in the middle.
Definitely some interesting history there. And you know, it's not a small feature. It's twenty kilometers.
High, so and it would be all around.
So it's like Manukea plus mount Everest, not even as talle As.
And it would just you would see it as this mountain range that just keeps going off into the horizon in both directions.
It's a really weird feature.
Yeah, all right, Well we are getting closer to the biggest mountain, the tallest mountain in the Solar System. And so what we've we've we've come down to the final two and so let's get into what they are, where they are, and how tall they are. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, so we're talking about the tallest mountain in the Solar System. Our first runner up for tallest mountain is not here on Earth. It's not on any moon, it's not on Jupiter. It's actually on Mars.
Yeah, it's sort of amazing little Mars. Right, It's much smaller than Earth, but it has much bigger features. It's very dramatic. And this mountain on Mars is the Olympus Mons, and it's almost twenty two kilometers high.
Right.
Remember Mount Ever is almost nine kilometers. Mount Okea, our tallest volcano, is ten kilometers. This thing is too Monkeaa.
It's basically called Mount Olympus, like the Greek god.
Yeah, exactly. It definitely wins the Olympics of mountains. It's enormous, its steel, and it's not just tall, right, it's also it's also really big because there's not that much gravity on Mars, and so it's sort of flows and becomes really broad, and the whole mountain if you look at like the edges of it, it goes it's like the size of France.
Wow, if you were to walk from the tip to the base, it'd be like walking from the center of France to the border.
Yeah. You can take like the outline of this mountain and super impose it on France and you're like, yeah, that's about the same size.
Do you think that's cheating a little bit?
Though?
Like if you have less gravity? Is that like steroids kind of in the Olympics of mountain sizes because it's like or you know how they it's easier to hit a long run in the higher altitudes because there's less gravity, you know.
Yeah, I think people were thinking bigger planet, bigger mountains, but you're right, smaller planet, less gravity, bigger.
Features, easier to maintain a big mountain.
Yeah, and easier to build it up and easier to maintain it. Yeah, things don't roll down as much. And so that's pretty impressive. That's twenty one point nine kilometers. And it's volcanic, right, it's stuff spewing out from the inside of Mars. Mars doesn't have tectonic activity as far as we know, so volcanoes are impact is the only way Mars could get up onto this list. And this is a volcanic mountain, right.
And so that's the biggest mountain on a planet in the Solar System, that's right. Like that's if you're just counting planets or moons, that's it. This is the biggest monde.
That's it. That's the number one feature on a planet in the Solar System. But but the most impressive is a really really weird feature. It's on an asteroid.
An asteroid. It's not even on a planet.
It's not even on a planet. It's not even on a moon. It's on an asteroid. There's this one asteroid in the asteroid belt. It's pretty big. It's like five hundred kilometers wide, which is sizable for an asteroid, and it's got this feature on it from an impact crater. And the thing you have to understand is that the crater itself is four hundred kilometers wide.
Wait wait wait wait, so how can it's like the most of the asteroid is a crater.
Yes, the whole like back half of this thing, the south polar this thing is just a big crater. Like this thing was totally rear ended and it didn't get any insurance information because nobody fixed this thing up. Like the whole back of this thing was just blown out in a big crater.
It's like if you take an apple and you take a giant bite out of it, that's kind of what you get.
Yeah. Yeah, but it's even weirder because this impact happened like a billion years ago. But the mountain is actually at the center what And that's something I don't understand at all. And the mountain has this name, it's called Rhea Silva. And the mountain at the center of this crater is twenty two kilometers high, so it's like just taller than that mountain on marble.
Wait wait, okay, so the biggest mountain in the Solar System is not on a planet. It's on an asteroid called what Vesta is the name of the asteroid Vesta Yesta, and the asteroid is five hundred kilometers wide. It has a hole that's four hundred kilometers wide, and in the middle of that hole is a mountain. This is such a weird structure to think about it.
There is weird stuff out there in the Solar System, and that's why I love these episodes, because like.
It's basically like a bowl, like a flying bowl with a mountain of walk a mole in the middle, floating out in space.
If you had lunch yet, Orge, I think maybe you should have a snack before these episodes.
I need another banana.
It's pretty weird. I was looking at pictures of this thing and it's definitely something weird to look at.
Oh okay, so if I google it, what what does it look like?
It looks like a huge hole with a mountain in the middle.
It's just a flying hole with a pimple in the middle.
And we've learned a lot about Vesta actually, because bits of it have fallen to Earth, like this collision happened a billion years ago, and a lot of the asteroids in the asteroid belt used to be bits of Vesta and then some of them fell to Earth, and like, you know, we can pick up a rock here on Earth and we can be like, this rock doesn't seem like it was formed on Earth. It seems like the Moon, or it seems like Mars, or it seems like this weird asteroid. And it's a pretty cool way to explore the Solar System just by finding little bits of it here on Earth.
Oh, and it's amazing we can track it, like this bit of a rock came from that astra Roy bazillion miles away.
Yeah, because a lot of these have their own different history, right, and that leads to different you know, fractions of ice and different kinds of ice, and different kinds of rock and different you know, heavy metals and stuff. And so from those sort of fingerprints you can tell where a rock came from, which I think is amazing. And so we found bits of Vesta. Yeah, but Vesta, in my mind, is the champ. It's just slightly edges out Mars, but it is more impressive.
Okay, so it has a feature that looks like a mountain. That is a mountain. I guess is it triangular? Is it? It's just a it's a giant bump. That peak tooth base is.
Twenty to twenty two kilometers. Yeah, And the edges of this crater are also very dramatic. They don't quite rise twenty two kilometers, but they're, you know, on the same scale. They're in the teens.
Whoa, And you're saying it's mostly made out of it's not made out of rock.
Yeah, it's like twenty percent rock and mostly ice, right, And there's people don't understand there's a lot of ice out there in the Solar System. There's huge chunks of it, and like some of those outer planets are icy giants, so there's an enormous amount of water frozen in ice in the outer Solar System. We have no shortage of resources like those movies where the aliens come to steal our water. It's like, what do you do? And there's so much more water out there.
There's a bunch of ice the day tomorrow where.
They're like sucking up our oceans with giant vacuums, and I'm like, what, So.
That means the biggest mountain in the Solar System is mostly made out of ice.
Mostly made out of ice. Yep, it's ice mountain.
No kidding. It's like you can ski on it to your own for a long time.
I don't know what a year is like on Vesta, but yeah, probably probably. I don't think the weather changes very much.
So this is out in the asteroid belt beyond kind of our planets, or in between our planet.
It was in the inner asteroid Bells. It's not out in the Nkoiper belt, and so it's not actually too far cool.
Well, there you go. That is the biggest mountain, the tallest mountain in the Solar System. It's a made out of ice, and it's in an asteroid, which is pretty amazing. Well, I think we ran down the list, Daniel. We found our champion.
Yes, I think we did. We can crown it if we could get to the topic.
We can get to the base of it. How do we even get there? That's all right? Well, we hope you enjoyed that trip into extreme mountains.
Thanks for tuning in for these Extreme Universe episodes and keep sending us your questions and suggestions. We love our listener mail.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Before you still have a question after I'm listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from it. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Hohohey that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel Andhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that. Daniel and Jorhea Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from myart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you asdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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