In a post in Reddit’s Space community, user odedhb shared the above photo that implies Australia is larger than our favorite controversial “planet” Pluto. Is it true?

Yes: Australia is bigger than Pluto. Kind of.

When you measure its width, that is. For example, Pluto’s diameter is only 1,473 miles long, according to NASA’s New Horizon Mission. The distance from Sydney, Australia to Perth, however, is around 2,500 miles.

In fact, North America is bigger than Pluto AND its moon Charon combined:

NASA

To put that in perspective, Australia is about the same size, give or take, as ‘Murica:

Reddit user Winterplatypus

Of course, Reddit users contributed more fun “facts” about Pluto and Australia:

And they asked some very important scientific questions about this pairing:

But let’s not forget about Mother Russia. As Reddit user tnydota points out, Russia’s surface area is about the same as Pluto’s.

Pluto’s surface area is about 17,646,012 square kilometers, according to NASA. And the surface area of Russia is around 17,075,200 square kilometers.

But if you include Pluto’s atmosphere, Pluto is larger than Earth. WTF?

NASA

NASA scientist, Michael Summers, from Pluto’s New Horizon team explains:

“If one defines it similar to the way we define the exobase of Earth’s atmosphere, then Pluto’s atmosphere has an outer limit of at least seven times Pluto’s radius above it surface. This means that the volume of Pluto’s atmosphere is over 350 times the volume of Pluto itself! This illustrates what a strange and wonderful new kind of world we are about to visit and explore.”

And Reddit user PTasty shares this final surprising fact:



NASA

Pluto was discovered in 1930, according to NASA. And the dwarf planet ninth planet from the sun (Pluto will always be a planet, in my heart) takes around 248 years to orbit the sun.

Consider this: