The Space Egg (a.k.a. an oddly shaped Class 5 GG)

[CMDR Horatio Caine]

Dunno if this is something unusual or not, but in my (short) exploration career of just short of 1900 systems visited I've never seen anything like it.


I do have my FoV up slightly, but nothing that would cause this, and I tried to take all the pictures pretty much head on so it can't be FoV related. The planet is even egg shaped on the system map.

The system is Eorm Scrua IS-K d8-546 , 17670.06 Ly from Sol.

 

[Witzo]

Centrifugal flattening, happens to all planets but only some gas giants are so affected it becomes visual. The faster a gas giant spins on its rotation axis, the more pushed out the equator becomes.

Edit: I checked your 0.2 days rotational period to screenshots I have of gas giants: most were 0.8 - 1.2 days. So you've found a quick spinner!

 

[CMDR Horatio Caine]

The L Star next to it was spinning nearly as fast as a Herbig AE/BE star too And the gas giant is so close to the star that you wouldn't be able to get between them without getting fried.

 

[Witzo]

Yeah, very close indeed!

 

[Patau82]

Centrifugal flattening, happens to all planets but only some gas giants are so affected it becomes visual. The faster a gas giant spins on its rotation axis, the more pushed out the equator becomes.

Edit: I checked your 0.2 days rotational period to screenshots I have of gas giants: most were 0.8 - 1.2 days. So you've found a quick spinner!

here's a pic of a Centrifugal flattened moon, can't remember what system its in

Spoiler

 

[CMDR Horatio Caine]

I knew planets did that in real life, just didn't realise the game visually showed the flattening. Pretty neat.

Here's another class 3 gas giant I just found, guess it's not all that rare:



That's Foerst QD-T e3-913 2, in case anyone wants to go look at it

Unrelated to flat planets something else I've wondered is what happens to stars that orbit another (usually larger) star so closely that their orbit actually ends up going through the other star. I've seen red dwarf stars with orbits going into S or CN stars. Wonder if they just end up going through and out the other side or if the game will actually have them crash into the surface.

 

[Witzo]

Unrelated to flat planets something else I've wondered is what happens to stars that orbit another (usually larger) star so closely that their orbit actually ends up going through the other star. I've seen red dwarf stars with orbits going into S or CN stars. Wonder if they just end up going through and out the other side or if the game will actually have them crash into the surface.

I assume both stars revolve around a common gravitational center, never touching each other since the bigger star also moves, but in a slightly smaller circle around that center.
The same way Pluto and Charon revolve around a common point.