Conspiracy theorists can rejoice: According to new detailed modeling of the evolution of planets, they have a shape that is far from spherical in the early stages of their formation. Most protoplanets look like poppers like Mentos or M&M’s. There is another interesting discovery that emerges from this simulation: A significant part of the material that forms planets is obtained from the poles, not by accumulation in the rotation plane.

Astrophysicists from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan, United Kingdom) carried out simulations of the process of planet formation in proto-planetary disks. This is not the first time such research has been conducted, but it is notable for its detail and attention to two important aspects of planet formation: the shape of protoplanets and the main directions of motion of the matter falling on them.

Scientific study accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, This is reviewed. Its text is available on the portal arXiv.

There are two main theories explaining the formation mechanisms of massive objects in protoplanetary disks. According to the first and most popular, planets form from protoplanets (and these in turn planetoids) as a result of the gradual attraction of smaller fragments and streams of matter to each other. Simply put, rocks, dust, and gas in the disk collide with each other, sometimes clumping together into large chunks. Sooner or later, this process leads to the formation of sufficiently large bodies whose gravitational influence accelerates the aggregation of matter exponentially.

The second theory attributes the formation of planets to the gravitational instability of the protoplanetary disk. Such a powerful moving structure cannot be homogeneous – turbulences arise in it, which leads to the slowing down of matter and its aggregation into compact areas. This can occur both around planetesimals and in regions of intersection of arms of the protoplanetary disk. This is the option researchers are considering UCLan in your simulation.

Note that both theories are not mutually exclusive: they complement each other on several different scales. It is assumed that most small objects around stars were formed by direct accretion of matter, while giant planets formed as a result of gravitational imbalances. The location of the planets of the terrestrial group in this picture of the earth is almost certainly the first way.

Because of its gravitational instability, simulating the protoplanetary disk as part of the planet formation model required half a million hours of supercomputing center processing time. DiRAC. The researchers ran a total of nine rounds of simulations, one test (to test the model) and eight experimental, each with slightly different parameters. The masses of the star (0.8 suns) and the proto-planetary disk (0.6 suns) always remained the same.

The result of the simulation was a total of 107 protoplanets of various sizes. But not all gas giants (this is a limitation of the simulation, a smaller scale could not be achieved due to the computational complexity of the model).

During the first tens of thousands of years of its development, each of the protoplanets took the shape of a highly flattened rotational ellipsoid. Thanks to the model’s high resolution, the researchers were able to obtain a dynamic picture of the movement of matter around the forming planets. It turns out that matter from the protoplanetary disk rotates around them and mostly falls not into the plane of rotation (at the equator), but from near the poles.

The new simulation will allow astrophysicists to more accurately analyze data from actual observations of protoplanetary disks. It will be incredibly useful for all researchers working with instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), “Atakam large antenna grids in the millimeter range” (TAKING) and Very Large Telescope (VLT).