alt Hacker News> It is estimated that Jupiter is essentially the largest any gas giant can get
That does not appear to be the case if we mean mass, not diameter.
Replies
Foskya • today at 2:48 PM
But... he literally said in the following sentence that adding more mass does not change size, implying that he is talking about diameter, not mass.
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lucideer • today at 8:30 PM
Who uses the word size to mean mass? The typical colloquial analogue to mass is "weight" - which nobody would ever conflate with "size".
Yes; I was under the impression that from context it was clear what I was talking about. In astrophysics, to avoid precisely this confusion, the convention is to use the adjective 'massive' when comparing, well, masses, and 'largest'/'smallest' for the dimension of length and its higher powers (radius/diameter/area/volume). For instance:
> the Sun is 3.33e5 as massive as Earth.