Verona rupes
Verona Rupes is a cliff of the Uranus moon Miranda . It lies at 18 ° S and 348 ° E on Miranda. At 20 kilometers high, it is the highest known cliff in the solar system and ten times higher than the depth of the Grand Canyon . It is named after the city of Verona , where Shakespeare's characters Romeo and Juliet lived.
Creation possibilities
Such a huge astrogeological anomaly, alongside the other bizarre formations on such a small moon - with an average diameter of only 471 kilometers - suggests enormous forces for their formation. One possibility as the cause of formation is the impact of a large body, through which the moon broke apart and reassembled itself. Alternatively, strong tidal forces from Uranus could have led to the formation of large rifts.
Others
If a human were to jump off this cliff, it would take them over twelve minutes to reach the bottom of the trench due to Miranda's low gravity. Even so, the fall would be fatal as it would hit the ground at a speed of over 200 km / h. On earth it would reach this speed after a free fall of only 160 meters and after only six seconds ( not counting the frictional resistance of the earth's atmosphere).
Web links
- Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: Verona Rupes ( USGS )
- Verona Rupes: the largest known cliff in the solar system - Astronomy Picture of the Day of April 4, 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dorling Kindersley Verlag GmbH: The Planets A visual journey through our solar system . Dorling Kindersley, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-8310-2830-6 .