Asteroid 2018 NW has a diameter of around 16 meters, which is around as much as 100 hot dogs. But hold onto your buns because it isn't going to hit us – though it may fly close.
  • DSLeMaster@beehaw.org
    9·
    1 year ago

    Who the hell measures anything in hotdogs? I’ve lived in America my whole life, and I’ve never heard anything but the Nathan’s Hotdog Eating record measured in hotdogs.

  • solanaceous@beehaw.org
    8·
    1 year ago

    A absurd grump for an absurd headline: What toasts my buns about this article is that it uses hot dogs as a unit of “size” when it really means length. The asteroid is actually the size of millions of hotdogs, because asteroids and hotdogs are both three-dimensional.

    • Unicorn 🌳@mander.xyz
      1·
      1 year ago

      I actually first assumed that they meant three dimensional volume when I read “size” and wondered how we saw such a tiny comet. Quite confusing (read: bad) choice of title…

  • slartibartfast42@beehaw.org
    7·
    1 year ago

    Obligatory “Americans will use everything but the metric system” joke aside, I wonder how astronomers can even discover an asteroid this small.

    • knokelmaat@beehaw.org
      11·
      1 year ago

      The “size” of 100 hot dogs is misleading. It is not a pile of 100 hot dogs to demonstrate the volume of the asteroid, but a line of 100 hot dogs to demonstrate the diameter, which is 16 meters. So in volume, this is a lot more than 100 hot dogs!

    • worfamerryman@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      This was a thing on Reddit as well.

      I think it came from the headlines in a few articles that would say things like an asteroid the size of a car… and an asteroid the size of an elephant and two giraffes.

      I think after a while it became an accepted meme to just report the size of the asteroid by comparing it to something random instead of just posting the metric size.