4 ms·
It’s an irregularly shaped body so there’s not one single radius. Mean radius is always going to be an approximation (even for Earth); the mean radius of the Mo
by mattficke 2y ago
It’s an irregularly shaped body so there’s not one single radius. Mean radius is always going to be an approximation (even for Earth); the mean radius of the Moon is 1,737.4 km.
- lxgr 2y agoBut it's still an approximation, not an estimate, right? (The fact that you can list the mean radius with sub-decimal precision suggests as much.) To me, an estimate suggests that there's error bars; an approximation suggests that there's variance that we can quantify (or at least we're very confident about our error bars).
- feoren 2y agoThere are error bars on absolutely everything that we ever measure.
- lxgr 2y agoSorry, missed a "large". It would sound pretty strange to me to claim that the distance between New York and London is "an estimated x kilometers" (with single-kilometer precision), even though there is tectonic movement etc.