00:00Flat Earthers have grown in number in recent years for whatever reason, however, experts now say
00:09another planet in our solar system may have actually once been more disk-like. New research
00:14has revealed that under certain conditions, gas planets that begin to form rather far out from
00:18their host star might just start life flat. They're calling these fledgling planets oblate
00:23spheroids, which are more of an M&M or flat pancake shape. The researchers use computer simulations,
00:29finding that as gas planets are born, they can start as a flat disk, where quickly cooling gas
00:34around a new star condenses under massive amounts of gravity and begins spinning until they're the
00:38round shape we're familiar with. What's more, they add that Jupiter may have actually started this way,
00:43beginning on more of a flat plane, before bulging out in all directions into the gas giant it is now,
00:48with the researchers also discovering that material which is pulled into the baby planet
00:52predominantly comes from the poles and not the equatorial region. These advanced computer
00:57simulations took upwards of 500,000 CPU hours to produce, with the researchers saying about the
01:03process, we have been studying planet formation for a long time, but never before had we thought
01:07to check the shape of the planets as they form in the simulations. We had always assumed that they
01:12they were spherical.
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