gwern comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 12:06AM

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Comment author: gwern 11 December 2014 05:35:09PM 2 points [-]

Sure, but that's not impressive and you'd expect him to be close to right about those numbers. As I understand it, it's pretty easy to derive the volume of planets from optical observations of diameter, and the mass from their orbits & Newtonian mechanics, and then divide to get net density.