Many crazy things exist in the solar system, beyond the solar system and there are unlimited guesses when it is about the space. Planets sort of look like big basketballs in general. Some planets have rings, sometimes they just look like gnocchi. More or less, to the average stargazer, planets have roughly the same shape, but a pair of scientists has just thrown a most delicious curveball into this whole equation.

Scientists claimed that these objects are technically called as ‘synestia’ which means an amalgam of “syn-“, meaning “together”, and “Hestia”, the Greek goddess of architecture.

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A recent publication in a news paper named Journal of Geophysical Research, planetary scientists Simon Lock at Harvard University and Sarah Stewart at UC Davis posit that Earth may have been a synestia in its youth. These doughnut-shaped objects might even explain the formation of other terrestrial planets like Mars, Venus, and much more outside our solar system.

In order to get deep into studying about these doughnuts, researchers ran models of how spinning objects might have collided with each other in our young planetary neighborhood. Earth is thought to have been formed after the birth of the Sun drew numerous small particles together, eventually creating larger clumps. Those lumps of material accreted into terrestrial planets, which, in the early days of our solar system, underwent some epic collisions before settling down.

“By analyzing calculations of giant impacts and models of planet formation, we show that typical rocky planets are substantially vaporized multiple times during accretion,” the researchers wrote. In other words, if an object was very big, very hot, and hit another object at a very high angular momentum, it could result in a synestia.

Earth was probably a synestia for only a couple of hundred years before it cooled down, contracted, and became sphere-like, which is possibly why we don’t currently live on a vaporised-rock-doughnut-planet.

“We show that rocky planets are vaporized multiple times during their formation and are likely to form synestias,” the researchers wrote. “The different structures of hot, rotating planets change our understanding of multiple aspects of planet formation, including the origin of our Moon.”

So, here’s to hoping someone out there finds a doughnut planet in a starry neighborhood of desserts.