What is Olympus Mons?
Olympus Mons, which means Mount Olympus in Latin, is the largest known mountain and volcano in the solar system. Located on Mars, it is 15.5 miles high (25 km), more than three times the Mount Everest height. The mountain is actually a volcano of the shields, which is a large volcano with a shallow spot created by eruption of lava with low viscosity. Since Mars has no active tectonics of the board, this hotspot exploded continuously in the same place, slowly built a larger and larger mountain as long as it became the highest and widest in the solar system.
Be a shield volcano, Olympus Mons is much wider than high. The mountain is 387.7 miles wide (624 km), ending with the Kaldera complex, which is 49.7 km (80 km) by 37.2 miles (60 km) wide and up to 1.2 km) deep. At the top is the air density of only 5 to 8% density on the surface, unlike the upper part of Mount Everest, which experiences about 32% air density, as located on the surfing land.
Because Mars atmospheric density is only about 1% of the earth to start, the air on top is justAbout 0.05% for the Earth - a real vacuum. Mars has a lower gravity than Earth, so it also has a higher atmosphere, with the peak of this mountain well into the atmosphere of Mars.
If the Olympus Mons were on the ground, a person standing on its peak could see 400 miles (643.7 km) on the horizon, compared to about 3 miles (4.8 km) for the observer on the sea level. On Earth is 15.5 miles (25 km) about a quarter of the way to the internationally accepted definition of space, 62.1 miles (100 km) above the surface of the planet.
This volcano is often compared with Mauna Kea in Hawaii, because both extremely large volcanoes shields according to the standard of their own planet. In fact, Mauna Kea is even higher than Mount Everest when it is measured from the place where thece bottom begins.
It is very unlikely that all mountain mountains larger than Olympus Mons were discovered on the rocky planets in the solar system. Discovery of such structures on rocky cores pLyn's giants are also somewhat unlikely, because the greater weight of these planets tend to make them make them more spherical, and even less mountainous.