460 views

Why is the Earth shaped like a sphere and not any other shape: cube, prism? [duplicate]

Why is the earth shaped like a sphere and not any other shape: cube, prism?
452 views

Why do planets have spherical shape? [duplicate]

Recently, I finished gravitation. I wonder why the shapes of planets or any body revolving around any star are not cubical or ellipsoidal. In our solar system all the planets are spherical in shape. ...
293 views

Why Earth is not a cuboid? [duplicate]

There must be some scientific reasons for why earth is a spheroid but what are they? If Earth would be a cuboid, Would it matter?
45 views

Shapes of planets? [duplicate]

I was wondering if there was a general explanation as to why it is that all the planets we observe are roughly spherical, and never flat/planar like galaxies. Could there potentially be flat or ...
6k views

Are “broken” planets possible in the real world?

In the Star Wars universe, there are mentioned (or rather shown) two planets that had some kind of great explosion in their history. First is Peragus, with its exposed core, that partially exploded ...
623 views

Is it possible to prove that planets should be approximately spherical using the calculus of variations?

Is it possible to use the Lagrangian formalism involving physical terms to answer the question of why all planets are approximately spherical? Let's assume that a planet is 'born' when lots of ...
382 views

Why are star systems flat but planets are spherical?

This video vaguely explains why the solar system (or other star systems and galaxies) are flat. So, does the same argument apply to planets? The general answer is that for a given volume, a sphere ...
283 views

Why are stars spherical whereas (some) galaxies are disks?

I read here that galaxies become disks if there is a lot of gas in them, since their angular momentum is conserved while their energy decreases due to collisions of the gas particle. I have two ...