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Are there planets in the universe that are not round? New facts come to light
2024-10-02 22:48:25 / MISTERE&KURIOZITETE
Every planet in our solar system is essentially round. But out in the universe, are there any planets that are not spherical? Technically, the planets are round, by definition; they must have enough mass to produce the gravity needed to pull themselves into a spherical shape.
"In fact, one of the specifications for being planets is that they have enough mass that makes them round," Susana Barros, a senior researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal, told Live Science.
But this does not necessarily mean that the planets are perfect spheres.
We call them round, but they're not really round, including our Earth,” Amirhossein Bagheri, a planetary science and geophysics researcher at the California Institute of Technology, told Live Science.
Earth and planets like it often have a bulge around the equator caused by centrifugal force, the outward force experienced by a spinning object. On Earth, inflation is slight but significant: Due to changes in centrifugal force and distance from Earth's center, things weigh about 0.5% less at the equator than at the poles.
But this effect can be dramatic under the right circumstances. "If the planet spins too fast, the poles will flatten out," Barros said, leading to a squashed, football-like shape. Centrifugal force is not the only force that can change the shape of a planet. "If the body is close enough to the host star, then these gravitational forces acting on the body become so great that the planet is elongated," Bagheri said.
One such body is the exoplanet WASP-103 b, a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter and 1.5 times its mass orbiting a star nearly twice the size of the Sun. WASP-103 b is also "really, really close to the star," Barros said. This changes its shape.
There is a balance between the force of the gas called hydrostatic equilibrium, which wants to expand the planet… and the force of gravitational pull. This pull from the host star leads to a planet that is "teardrop-shaped," Barros said.
This deformation can also change the way the planet rotates. If a planet starts out with a pronounced bulge toward the host star and continues to orbit normally, "then that bulge wouldn't always be in the same place," Barros said.
Moving this bulge around the planet as it rotates uses a lot of energy. "So they start out like that, but then pretty quickly, they'll line up," Barros said. The planet is tidally locked to its host star, with the same side of the planet facing the star at all times.
Additionally, WASP-103 b is spinning extremely fast around its star, leading to a flattening of its poles, Barros said. The result is a very squeezed planet. But even a compressed sphere is still mostly spherical. Some scientists have posited the possibility of a toroidal or donut-shaped planet. This could hypothetically happen if a planet rotated fast enough that the outward centrifugal force outweighed the force of gravity pulling the planet's mass toward its center.
But a toroidal planet has never been observed and is unlikely to be in the near future. "It's more science fiction than science," Bagheri said.
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