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→The equilibrium as a balance of energies: Copy edit ( minor ) ▸ Diction ▸ Paragraph rewritten in the third person ("...imagine..." : subject = you understood = second person ). Link added to article "Work ( physics )". Tags: Mobile edit Mobile app edit Android app edit |
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[[Gravity]] tends to contract a celestial body into a [[sphere]], the shape for which all the mass is as close to the center of gravity as possible. [[Rotation]] causes a distortion from this spherical shape; a common measure of the distortion is the [[flattening]] (sometimes called ellipticity or oblateness), which can depend on a variety of factors including the size, [[angular velocity]], [[density]], and [[Elasticity (physics)|elasticity]].
Something analogous to this occurs in planet formation. Matter first coalesces into a slowly rotating disk-shaped distribution, and collisions and friction convert kinetic energy to heat, which allows the disk to self-gravitate into a very oblate spheroid.
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