Quirks and Quarks

Why don't we have potato-shaped planets?

Dr. Ray Jayawardhana answers this week's Quirks Question.
(NASA, ESA, W. Sparks (STScI), and the USGS Astrogeology Science Center)

This week our question comes from Martine Dennis, a listener in Orillia, Ontario. Martine emailed us with a question about the shapes of objects in space.

Are all planets and planetoids spherical? If so, are there stages t becoming spherical? Does dark matter "push" everything into spheres, or are the particles "pulled" together by the force of gravity?

To answer this question we reached Dr. Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of physics and astronomy at York University

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