Surprise! Baby exoplanets might look like Smarties candies rather than spheres

[Admin]

Infant exoplanets may not be spherical as astronomers have always assumed. Instead, they may be oblate spheroids, like the 'Smarties' candy found in Europe.

Surprise! Baby exoplanets might look like Smarties candies rather than spheres : Read more

 

[rod]

Okay, interesting, perhaps a flat planet too The paper states, "6. Conclusions
Disc-instability protoplanets are not spherically symmetric, but close to being oblate spheroids. Their outer regions show more complex, asymmetric structure due to interactions with the protostellar disc and their formation history. Gas accretion happens faster from the protoplanet poles than from the protoplanet equator. We expect that this may lead to a strong modification of the observed properties of protoplanets (e.g. their spectrum, Hα emission; see Zhu 2015; Marleau et al. 2022, 2023) with the viewing angle that needs to be taken into account when interpreting observations, like those of PDS 70 b,c (Keppler et al.
2018; Haffert et al. 2019) and AB Aurigae b (Currie et al. 2022)."

PDS 70 system is confirmed, https://exoplanet.eu/catalog/pds_70_b--6770/

Planet PDS 70 c

Detailed information about planet PDS 70 c and its parameters.

exoplanet.eu

https://exoplanet.eu/catalog/ab_aur_b--522/, is a confirmed exoplanet too. How giant impacts during planet formation in various disc masses could alter their shapes too I did not see disclosed.

 

[Helio]

It seems a bit of a stretch to me, pun intended.

Are Pluto and Charon heavily oblate?

 

[rod]

It seems a bit of a stretch to me, pun intended.

Are Pluto and Charon heavily oblate?

Good question Helio. As I read the paper and space.com article, the model seems focused on gas giant planet formations like Jupiter. The space.com stated: "The UCLan team arrived at their cosmic-candy conclusion after examining the formation mechanisms of gas giant worlds like Jupiter. They focused on the initial shapes of such planets and how these could facilitate the growth of planetary seeds, resulting in massive planets even larger than our solar system's giants."

I did not see something specific related to much smaller size planets like Pluto, Venus, Earth, Mercury, Mars, etc. Yes, Pluto is a planet IMO still

 

[Helio]

Perhaps their model works if these giants are symmetric for all three axes, else their strong gravity would cause cascading failure once one piece broke free falling down …IMO.