Member-only story

Are there only spherical celestial bodies?

Giuseppe Frisella
2 min readSep 25, 2023

--

Celestial bodies are for the most part spherical, but the density of a planet, its size and the speed of rotation on its own axis can, and in most cases do, cause the shape of a celestial body to diverge from that of a perfect sphere.

Firstly, the planet must have enough mass for gravity to compact and smooth it into a sphere. Below this threshold, celestial bodies can have any shape, as in the case of comets and asteroids.

A planet with a low content of heavy materials and therefore low density is more deformable by its own rotation and other celestial bodies, as opposed to denser ones.

With that in mind, there are cases in which planets take on shapes quite different from spheres, similar to eggs or discs (which I also discuss here and here).

There is also a star, called HD74423, with a peculiar look due to a red dwarf with which it forms a binary system. The star undergoes such great tidal forces that it took on the shape of a droplet.

--

--

Giuseppe Frisella
Giuseppe Frisella

Written by Giuseppe Frisella

I'm a curious person and I'm on Medium mainly to read and share thoughts and knowledge. I love science, especially physics and evolutionary biology.

No responses yet