Square Planets

Looking at the universe I have always thought it odd that planets were round and not some other shape. To make a sphere on earth isn’t really that easy.  I can’t say that I have tried it 

But just trying to get a lump of plasticine into a sphere with your hands is almost impossible. On the other hand, planets aren’t perfect spheres, as they have mountains and oceans and the Earth for instance, is an oblate spheroid. In English that means that the Earth is squashed and bulges at the equator. If you have a look at the picture of the earth then you can see that it will look like it is totally round and what we’ve been talking about is just small imperfections. As we all know all the planets look round, and I have never found a square one  as hard as I can look.

Logically you would expect to find some square, triangle, or just generally funny shaped planets as if you look at asteroids and comets there are so many varied and different shapes that you could be looking at clouds.

The Planets

Comets are objects composed mostly of ice and dust that grow tails when they approach the sun. All comets have a nucleus, which is the hard rock/ice object. When a comet nucleus nears the sun, solar energy begins to heat the ice and vaporize it. The gas flies off the comet, sometimes violently enough to break the nucleus apart, and throws dust up with it. The gases form a cloud around the nucleus called the coma. Some of the gas is stripped of electrons and blown back by the solar wind. This forms a bluish coloredion tail.

Asteroids are the small rocky objects in the Solar System. The largest asteroid is Ceres, which is 933 kilometers (580 miles) across. The smallest asteroids that we’ve observed in detail are only tens of meters in size.

It could be that all the planets just appear to be round and when you look at them close they are anything but round. Well, as we have said that is true but only to a perfectionist. Perhaps some god like being has just made some marbles and lost a few in a dark bag. These to us would be the planets and we would be like microbes crawling across the surface. I am not quite sure what these superhuman Godlike beings  made of the landing on the moon or the tiny robot explorers that we have sent across the solar system or perhaps they just don’t care. At the end of the men in black film there is a similar idea and if I can remember correctly there are aliens, playing marbles with planets, or is it universes? Anyway, that film is definitely worth a watch if you haven’t watched it.

The real reason why planets are round is that these chunks of rock are a lot larger than asteroids and comets so gravity has a much larger effect on them. Gravity is a force that pulls everything inwards to the centre of this massive rock that will become a planet. The pull is so great for the larger rocks that they are pulled into spheres. Smaller rocks have less gravity and are pulled into shapes that we see as asteroids and comets. If you think of a planet that is square then there would not be enough support for the corners, think of them like tall structures jutting above the surface. Even a solid performs like a liquid under this type of gravitational force, and therefore the corner will be pulled inwards. This happens all over the rock, and eventually creates a sphere.

That really does get a bit boring then as we can only live on planets, or can we? What would it be like to live on a large square asteroid? Well, I don’t know because I have never lived on a square asteroid. But if you think about it it would cause a few small problems. If you lived on one side then there would be an end of the world, which would drop away until you stepped over onto the other face. It wouldn’t be so good to slip as you were stepping from one face to the other as a small slip could be quite painful. You wouldn’t fall, when you came to the edge as gravity would still affect you and hold you onto your rock.

Weather would be a bit odd on a square planet. Season’s wouldn’t be as we know them either. We get the seasons, because the Earth is on the tilt and basically when the earth’s North Pole is tilting towards the sun then the northern hemisphere is in the summer and the Southern Hemisphere is in winter as we all know. If the square planet didn’t tilt, and then the top and bottom of the planet wouldn’t get any sun at all and would probably be iced over, pretty good, if you’re into ice skating. Night and day on the other surfacess would be normal, well almost as I expect there would be some smaller changes as well.

Differently shaped asteroids

We are so used to living on a round planet that it might be hard to live on a square one. It would be a laugh though and I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.

Nasa’s photographs of some fly by missions.

Selling an asteroid, nice picture