By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
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Why are the stars, planets and moons round, even as comets and asteroids are irregular in shape?
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The answer boils down to the influence of gravity.
When we look out at the Solar System, we see objects of all sizes – from tiny grains of dust, to giant planets and the Sun. A common theme among those objects is the big ones are (more or less) round, while the small ones are irregular. But why?
A variety of the Solar System’s small bodies, to scale. Bigger objects are round, but the small ones are anything but! Photo credit: Wikipedia/Antonio Ciccolella
Gravity is the key
The answer to why the bigger objects are round boils down to the influence of gravity. An object’s gravitational pull will always point towards the centre of its mass. The bigger something is, the more massive it is, and the larger its gravitational pull.
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For solid objects, that force is opposed by the strength of the object itself. For instance, the downward force you experience due to Earth’s gravity does not pull you into the centre of the Earth. That is because the ground pushes back up at you; it has too much strength to let you sink through it.
However, Earth’s strength has limits. Think of a great mountain, such as Mount Everest, getting larger and larger as the planet’s plates push together. As Everest gets taller, its weight increases to the point at which it begins to sink. The extra weight will push the mountain down into Earth’s mantle, limiting how tall it can become.
How tall can a mountain on Earth get?
If Earth were made entirely from the ocean, Mount Everest would just sink down all the way to Earth’s centre (displacing any water it passed through). Any areas where the water was unusually high would sink, pulled down by Earth’s gravity.
Areas where the water was unusually low would be filled up by water displaced from elsewhere, with the result that this imaginary ocean Earth would become perfectly spherical.
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But the thing is, gravity is actually surprisingly weak. An object must be really big before it can exert a strong enough gravitational pull to overcome the strength of the material from which it is made. Smaller solid objects (metres or kilometres in diameter) therefore have gravitational pulls that are too weak to pull them into a spherical shape.
This, incidentally, is why you do not have to worry about collapsing into a spherical shape under your own gravitational pull – your body is far too strong for the tiny gravitational pull it exerts to do that.
Reaching hydrostatic equilibrium
When an object is big enough that gravity wins – overcoming the strength of the material from which the object is made – it will tend to pull all the object’s material into a spherical shape. Bits of the object that are too high will be pulled down, displacing material beneath them, which will cause areas that are too low to push outward.
When that spherical shape is reached, we say the object is in “hydrostatic equilibrium”. But how massive must an object be to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium? That depends on what it is made of. An object made of just liquid water would manage it really easily, as it would essentially have no strength – as water’s molecules move around quite easily.
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Meanwhile, an object made of pure iron would need to be much more massive for its gravity to overcome the inherent strength of the iron. In the Solar System, the threshold diameter required for an icy object to become spherical is at least 400 km – and for objects made primarily of stronger material, the threshold is even larger.
Saturn’s moon Mimas, which looks like the Death Star, is spherical and has a diameter of 396 km. It is currently the smallest object we know of that may meet the criterion.
Saturn’s moon Mimas, as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft, is barely large enough for gravity to pull it into a spherical shape. The vast crater Herschel, which makes Mimas look like the Death Star, is the scar of an impact so large it almost destroyed Mimas! Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute
Constantly in motion
But things get more complicated when you think about the fact that all objects tend to spin or tumble through space. If an object is spinning, locations at its equator (the point halfway between the two poles) effectively feel a slightly reduced gravitational pull compared to locations near the pole.
The result of this is the perfectly spherical shape you would expect in hydrostatic equilibrium is shifted to what we call an “oblate spheroid” – where the object is wider at its equator than its poles. This is true for our spinning Earth, which has an equatorial diameter of 12,756 km and a pole-to-pole diameter of 12,712 km.
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The faster an object in space spins, the more dramatic this effect is. Saturn, which is less dense than water, spins on its axis every ten and a half hours (compared with Earth’s slower 24-hour cycle). As a result, it is much less spherical than Earth.
Saturn’s equatorial diameter is just above 120,500km – while its polar diameter is just over 108,600km. That is a difference of almost 12,000km!
The Cassini spacecraft’s final widefield mosaic of Saturn and its moons, taken in September 2017, really gives a feel for how oblate the giant planet is! Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Some stars are even more extreme. The bright star Altair, visible in the northern sky from Australia in the winter months, is one such oddity. It spins once every nine hours or so. That is so fast that its equatorial diameter is 25% larger than the distance between its poles.
Short answer
The closer you look into a question like this, the more you learn. But to answer it simply, the reason big astronomical objects are spherical (or nearly spherical) is that they are massive enough that their gravitational pull can overcome the strength of the material they are made from.
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Jonti Horner is a Professor (Astrophysics) at the University of Southern Queensland.
By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...
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