4-Year-Old Son Wants to Know...

[Tresob]

If there is a way to make the dwarf planet Haumea have an irregular shape.

[TRON]

your 4 year old son wants to know that and knows the various dwarf planets? DAYUM! your kid is destined to be the jimmy neutron of the class!(an absolute f#cking genious)

[Jar]

It's a great question, but unfortunately we only support spherical shapes for larger objects right now. You can see irregularly shaped asteroids and human-scale objects. We'd like to eventually support oblong shapes and bulging from spinning, but that likely won't happen for a while. :)

[im4space]

According to Dictionary.com the definition for dwarf planet is
"a spherical celestial body revolving about the sun, similar to a planet but not large enough to gravitationally clear its orbital region of most or all other celestial bodies. Pluto is a dwarf planet."

So normal dwarf planets do not have irregular shapes. But that doesn't mean that Universe Sandbox ² shouldn't be able to it.

[Tresob]

Originally posted by Jar:

It's a great question, but unfortunately we only support spherical shapes for larger objects right now. You can see irregularly shaped asteroids and human-scale objects. We'd like to eventually support oblong shapes and bulging from spinning, but that likely won't happen for a while. :)

Thanks for the response! We look forward to it!

Originally posted by TRON:

your 4 year old son wants to know that and knows the various dwarf planets? DAYUM! your kid is destined to be the jimmy neutron of the class!(an absolute f#cking genious)

He has a model solar system made of playground balls arranged throughout our home. On days we he sets up the asteroid belt (made of plastic practice golf balls), it can be quite treacherous to walk about.

He's been using a small plush football for Haumea, but has recently begun to demand that we bake a clay model so the edges are less pointy.

He's a stickler for accuracy.

Originally posted by im4space:

According to Dictionary.com the definition for dwarf planet is
"a spherical celestial body revolving about the sun, similar to a planet but not large enough to gravitationally clear its orbital region of most or all other celestial bodies. Pluto is a dwarf planet."

So normal dwarf planets do not have irregular shapes. But that doesn't mean that Universe Sandbox ² shouldn't be able to it.

NASA's website desribes Haumea as a dwarf planet...but it is not perhaps a "normal" case...

"Its fast spin distorts Haumea's shape, making this dwarf planet look like a football." (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/haumea/in-depth/ )

[OuijaMawl]

Maybe he can use a bean bag (hackie sack) for haumea, its sort of spherical and distorts when placed on the groud due to gravity in a flatted out oblate spheroid shape. its easier than baking out anything from clay and it won't break like clay would if you drop it. I don't know about you but I'd hate to have to make another one if it gets thrown, stepped on, or dropped by accident.

Haumea isn't a hugely special case, it is large enough to gravitationally draw in anything nearby, possibly how it acquired its two moons. So in theory should also be able to clear out some of its orbital path of debris. Though not all of it.

I'd assume hypothetically if its rotation rate slowed to normal speeds that eventually it would return to a more natural spherical shape after some gravity induced restucturing of the surface.

[BlueMarble]

I don't know about asteroids being irregularly shaped, though. I used to see that Halley's comet was irregularly shaped, and now it's just spherical. It doesn't even have that much mass to obtain a spherical shape.

[OuijaMawl]

Asteroids come in many shapes and forms, the larger ones are the ones are changed into a spheroid shape under the force of gravity. Some intresting shaped asteroids are: Hygeia (fourth most massive in the solar system), Itokawa, Hartley 2, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Hector, Eros, and Kleopatra. some other objects with strange shapes are orbiting planets, like Pan, Atlas, and the shepherd moons of Saturn and even Hyperion is kind of odd looking as well.

[BlueMarble]

Oh, ok.

[VadamFlier]

Your son is destined to be an astrophysicist

[turmith]

My son seconds this request to have a football shaped Haumea.