Someone liked dwarf planet Haumea so much they put a ring on it

Re: Mugshots

I'd guess the triaxial elipsoid surface is a gravitational equipotential surface as well, meaning gravity is always normal to the local surface, altho not the same strength everywhere. So yes, you could stand. Might get dizzy tho...

Re: One thing is sure

Reality in general, when you delve down to the small things whether at CERN or with a powerful microscope or a genetics database wonders appear unguessed at and certainly not in any holy book. The things I have seen as a mere biologist.

Not of biological import and artefacts of sectioning amorphous structures but I have large format negative plates of sections through developing mouse muscle in the electron microscope where the nuclei if the new muscle fibres (termed myotubes back then) resemble animals. I have a duck, rubber variety, swimming in an egg shaped cell, a rhino, a goldfish with flowing fins and others. By chance they were all found in mutant muscle not control muscle so they are my Micro Mutant Muscle Menagerie.

I've used the duck in talks I go 'and this is a maturing secondary myotube, notice this and that' pause 'and it is also a duck in an egg' which allows the audience to laugh.

Re: Hal Clement fans!

Nope! Haumea has almost no mass and little surface gravity while Mesklin is huge and the prime fictional example of a heavy planet.

Mesklin has 16 times the mass of Jupiter and a rotation time (day) of 17.75 minutes. The centrifugal force affected its apparent surface gravity, giving 3G at the equator (rim) and 275G at the poles. It is well flattened - 77,250 km diameter at the equator and just 31,770 km thick at the poles, so its diameter is around 2.5 times its thickness. Clement knew what he wanted for his novel: when he wrote it there was thought to be something like this in the 61 Cygni system.

Re: Shirley or surely

The reference will live on long after any human recollection of the film has ever existed. The reference now has a life of it's own, bigger than the film.