Was Jupiter At One Point in its Lifetime Flat? A New Study Says It Could Have Been

Amaze Lab

Flat Earth conspiracy theorists have grown in number in recent years, despite no evidence supporting their beliefs. However, experts now say another planet in our Solar System may have actually once been more disk-like.

Transcript

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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