Why are planets round and mostly everything else in space a different shape?

Answer 1

It has to do with mass. Once an object reaches a certain mass, its gravity will pull itself together. The forces required need to be enough to break rock and compact it into the gaps between the rocks. Basically, gravity pulls the planets and stars into spheres. A flaoting asteroid wont have enough gravity to pull itself together.

Answer 2

If u are an astronaut in space capsule and squeeze out a little water or food what shape would it take. It is spherical as it has a gravity for the other parts.This is why most all planets are pretty round.

Answer 3

Most moons, all planets, and all stars (of all sizes) are relatively spherical.
It's due to the mass of the object - once you have enough mass in a single object the gravity pulls all the material towards the centre and that produces a sphere.
Asteroids and some of the smaller moons (like Deimos and Phobos around Mars) are too small to have enough gravity to pull the material into a sphere.

Answer 4

This is an extremely simplified answer.

Planets are round (ish) because of their rotational and gravitational forces.

The same goes for just about every other "solid" body in space (stars, comets, dwarf planets, etc).

Those that are different shapes are either gaseous bodies (nebulae) or clusters (star clusters, galaxies, etc) which don't exhibit the same rotation and gravity forces as "solid" bodies.

Answer 5

Planets are not round,they only look round through a telescope and stars are all different shapes and sizes.

Answer 6

When any body form in space it is in free fall, gravity will increase as the mass increases, this process leads to the formation of spherical shapes, irregular shaped objects are the result of collisions of bodies.

Answer 7

Planets are round because their gravitational field acts as though it originates from the center of the body and pulls everything toward it. With its large body and internal heating from radioactive elements, a planet behaves like a fluid, and over long periods of time succumbs to the gravitational pull from its center of gravity. The only way to get all the mass as close to planet's center of gravity as possible is to form a sphere. The technical name for this process is "isostatic adjustment." With much smaller bodies, such as the 20-kilometer asteroids we have seen in recent spacecraft images, the gravitational pull is too weak to overcome the asteroid's mechanical strength. As a result, these bodies do not form spheres. Rather they maintain irregular, fragmentary shapes. Answer posted July 30, 2001 --------------------------------------... UNDERSTANDING PHYSICS, VOLUME I, MOTION, SOUND and HEAT by Isaac Asimov An object at sea level, for instance, may be 6370 km from the center of the earth, but at the top of a nearby mountain it may be 6373 km from the center, and a stratoliner may take it to a height of 6385 km from the center. Even if we confine ourselves to sea level, the distance to the center of the earth is not always the same. Under the action of gravity alone, the earth would be a perfect sphere (barring minor surface irregularities)-a fact pointed out by Aristotle-and then the distance from sea level to the earth's center would be the same everywhere. A second factor is introduced, however, by the fact that the earth rotates about its axis. This rotation means, as Newton was the first to recognize, that the earth cannot be a perfect sphere. As the earth rotates about its axis, the surface of the earth is continually undergoing an acceleration inward toward the center of the earth (just as the moon does in revolving about the earth). If this is so, then Newton's third law comes into play. The earth's center exerts a constant force on the earth's outer layers to maintain that constant inward acceleration as the planet rotates; the outer layers must, therefore, by action and reaction, exert a force outward on the earth's center. The force directed inward is usually called a centripetal force, and the one directed outward is called a centrifugal force (the words coming from Latin phrases meaning "move toward the center" and "flee from the center," respectively). The two forces are oppositely directed and the result is a stretching of the earth's substance. If you were to imagine a rope stretching from the earth's surface to the earth's center, with the earth's surfaces pulling outward at one end of the rope and the earth's center pulling inward at the other end, you would expect the rope to stretch by a certain amount; the earth's substance does exactly that. If every point on the earth's surface were rotating at the same speed, the stretch would be the same everywhere and the earth would be perfectly spherical still. However, the earth rotates about an axis, and the nearer a particular portion of the earth's surface is to the axis, the more slowly it rotates. At the poles, the earth's surface touches the axis and the speed of rotation is zero. At the equator, the earth's surface is at a maximum distance from the axis and the speed of rotation is highest (just over 1600 kilometers an hour). The interacting forces are zero at the poles, therefore, and increase smoothly as the equator is approached. The "stretch" increases, too, and a bulge appears in the earth, which reaches maximum size at the equator. Because of this equatorial bulge, the distance from the center of the earth at sea level at the equator is 21 km (13 miles) greater than the distance from the center of the earth to sea level at either pole. The earth, therefore, is not a sphere, but an oblate spheroid. To be sure, 21 km in a total distance of 6370 km is not much, but it is enough to introduce measurable differences in the value of g. What with the equatorial bulge and local differences in altitude, there are points in Alaska where the value of g is over 9.82 m/sec2, whereas at the equator it is barely higher than 9.78 m/sec2. That represents a difference of nearly one-half of one percent and is reflected in weight. In other words, the weight of an object changes measurably from place to place on the earth's surface, as a spring balance would show. A man who weighs 200 pounds at the poles would weigh 199 pounds at the equator. To a chemist or physicist interested in the mass of an object (many properties depend on the mass), the measurement of weight as a substitute for mass would introduce serious inaccuracies.

Answer 8

Everthing that formed from the big bang was in a state of molten form and as it cooled it took on the natural round shape due to gravity being equalised from a centre point then as bodies collided they too created very high temperatures blending in to the body to which they collided as the temperature on impacked turned them molten, and your supposition is wrong. most everything in the universe is global

Answer 9

gravity