The flat earthers may have been right about something, but they were a few billion years too late. Scientists from the University of Central Lancashire have found in a new study that newly formed planets can take on a flat shape before they “round up”.

It is known that planets form from protoplanetary disks – rings of dust and gas surrounding stars. However, the process itself is still controversial: the most common theory refers to the process of core accretion, when dust particles begin to “stick together”, forming larger and larger objects, until they grow into planets; and less accepted, which speaks of the instability of the disk, which allegedly cools and breaks up into particles that then become planets.

In a new study, scientists have developed a supercomputer simulation of the formation of planets in order to investigate what form they can take at a “young age”.

“We’ve been studying the formation of planets for a long time, but we’ve never before tested what shape they take in the beginning,” says Dr. Dimitris Stamatellos. “We always thought they were spherical.”

In the course of the study, the scientists noticed that with the method of disk instability, the planets do not grow outward uniformly, remaining in the shape of a sphere all the time, but tend to collect more material at their poles than at their equators, stretching into a “flattened spheroid”, which has a somewhat flat, oval shape – and only over time acquire the usual spherical shape.

So far, only simulations show such results, but scientists say that further observations of young planets will help confirm or completely refute the disk instability method of planet formation.

The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters.

Source: New Atlas