How come planets are spherical, albeit with somewhat flattened poles? — DB
The answer is gravity. Gravity smashes the planets into spheres. To understand this, imagine trying to build a huge mountain on the earth’s surface. As you begin to heap up the material for your mountain, the weight of the material at the top begins to crush the material at the bottom. Eventually the weight and pressure become so great that the material at the bottom squeezes out and you can’t build any taller. Every time you put new stuff on top, the stuff below simply sinks downward and spreads out. You can’t build bumps bigger than a few dozen miles high on earth because there aren’t any materials that can tolerate the pressure. In fact, the earth’s liquid core won’t support mountains much higher than the Himalayas—taller mountains would just sink into the liquid. So even if a planet starts out non-spherical, the weight of its bumps will smash them downward until the planet is essentially spherical.
The flattened poles are the result of rotation—as the planet spins, the need for centripetal (centrally directed) acceleration at its equator causes its equatorial surface to shift outward slightly, away from the planet’s axis of rotation. The planet is therefore wider at its equator than it is at its poles.