00:00 [Music]
00:04 Flat earthers have grown in number in recent years for whatever reason.
00:07 However, experts now say another planet in our solar system may have actually once been more disk-like.
00:13 New research has revealed that under certain conditions, gas planets that begin to form
00:17 rather far out from their host star might just start life flat.
00:21 They're calling these fledgling planets oblate spheroids,
00:24 which are more of an M&M or flat pancake shape.
00:26 The researchers use computer simulations, finding that as gas planets are born,
00:31 they can start as a flat disk, where quickly cooling gas around a new star condenses
00:35 under massive amounts of gravity and begins spinning until they're the round shape we're familiar with.
00:40 What's more, they add that Jupiter may have actually started this way,
00:43 beginning on more of a flat plane, before bulging out in all directions into the gas giant it is now.
00:48 With the researchers also discovering that material which is pulled into the baby planet
00:52 predominantly comes from the poles and not the equatorial region,
00:56 these advanced computer simulations took upwards of 500,000 CPU hours to produce.
01:01 With the researchers saying about the process,
01:03 "We have been studying planet formation for a long time, but never before had we thought
01:07 to check the shape of the planets as they form in the simulations.
01:10 We had always assumed that they were spherical."
