Mount Everest as Sand

At just over 29,000 feet high (almost 9000 meters), Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world.

If you can hold the image of a commercial jet flying through the sky in your mind, the peak of Mount Everest is almost up there touching where that plane is. Some smaller planes fly lower than Everest’s peak.

Some time around 50 million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate began crashing into the Eurasian plate. Newton’s First Law teaches us that when two giant landmasses like these collide, they don't just stop. All of this energy had to go somewhere, and the Indian plate pushed beneath the Eurasian plate, breaking through to the surface and forcing the ground to crash and fold and bend upwards.

That’s how the Himalayan mountain range was crated, and those same forces are still at play today, causing Everest to grow by a few millimeters every year.

Everest is the pinnacle of the range. It’s so high up there that people often get sick from too little oxygen on the way up, and there’s only a third as much O2 as there is on the ground.

Everest is famously tall, but it’s also enormously massive—something on the order of 810 trillion kilograms. That’s 135,000 Great Pyramids, more than a thousand times as many humans as are alive, or 8 million Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.

Those things are mind-boggling in their size! It’s hard to comprehend how much space 8 million aircraft carriers—basically floating cities—take up, but try holding that in your mind for a minute.

Here’s the kicker: whether you envision Mount Everest, 135,000 Great Pyramids, a proverbial ocean full of aircraft carriers, or a thousand times as many humans as there are, all of that mass would end up the same size if it was inside of a neutron star.

How much space would all that mass take up if it was smashed down into just neutrons?

Smaller than a grain of sand.

Neutron stars are truly mind-boggling. Something a little bit larger than our sun (about 1.4 times larger) gets smashed together into a ball the size of a city. Now, Mount Everest is really big compared to us, but it’s so tiny compared to the size of our Sun as to be all but insignificant.

Note: the analogies I used above are guesstimates, but they’re not likely to prove too far off, and I mainly just wanted to share a little wonder of neutron stars with you today. The universe is amazing, full of wonders like this.

What are some of your favorite facts about the way the universe works? The more surprising, the better!