Australia is wider than the Moon.

Geoscience Australia confirms that the distance from Perth in the west to Byron Bay in the east is roughly 4,000 kilometers. NASA measurements show the Moon’s diameter is only 3,474.8 kilometers. This makes Australia about 525 kilometers wider than the Moon. That extra space is roughly the distance between London and Paris.Even though Australia is wider, the Moon is still much bigger overall. The Moon is a sphere, so it has a huge surface area of 38 million square kilometers. Australia is a flat landmass on Earth with a surface area of about 7.6 million square kilometers. This means the Moon has about five times more total surface area than the continent.If you could drive a car across the middle of the Moon at 100 kilometers per hour, the trip would take about 34 hours. Driving across Australia at the same speed would take 40 hours. This comparison is a favorite tool for astronomers at the Royal Observatory Greenwich to help people understand the scale of space.Maps can be tricky because they often stretch landmasses near the poles. This makes it hard to judge how big things really are just by looking at a globe. Australia’s unique, wide shape on the Indo-Australian Plate gives it this surprising record over our neighbor in the sky.