Recently, the research team used the latest data to simulate the birth and formation of planets, and the results were surprising to astronomers and very different from what they had previously imagined.
While the astronomical community continues to study how planets form, they all assume that planets are originally spherical, and recently a new team has modeled how the turbulence of dust disks revolving around the primordial star affects planet formation, including planetary shapes. The results show that when the planets were formed, they were oblate like m&m chocolate for a while.
Simulations show that the planet appears spherical when viewed from the polar region of the gaseous primordial planet, but when viewed from the equator, it is flattened. (Source: Science Alert, the same below).
Astronomers generally believe that stars are made up of massive molecular clouds of dust with a high density of clouds, which are produced by perturbation and gravitational collapse, and form a dust disk around the star, and the material on it will gradually cool to form planets, moons, asteroids, comets and other celestial bodies. Smaller terrestrial planets such as Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury are believed to be formed by the gradual accumulation of large rocks, which stick together and accumulate until they eventually form planets.
As for how large gas planets are formed, scientists believe that during the cooling process of matter, the disk may be unstable, the rapid cooling disk breaks into blocks, and the condensation under the action of gravity forms planets. This is an attractive idea, as it may explain why the size and formation of some planets are difficult to explain by accretion theory. Very large planets that are out of proportion to the host star, planets that orbit too widely, large planets that are born in too short a time.
Simulations show that four primordial planets were born under the instability of the material disk around the primordial star, and the position of the star and planet is gray dots, and the area with high material density is red.
With the help of the high-speed computing power of a supercomputer, the team simulated the birth and growth of planets when the disk was unstable. The results show that large gaseous planets first form flattened when they rotate, and then gradually accumulate at the poles with less centrifugal force, and finally approach a spherical shape. The team hopes that more observations of exoplanets will support this theory.
The first image is a schematic diagram, **pixabay).