While Felix Baumgartner may have journeyed 36 kilometers, a journey through a bottomless pit would take you more than 12,000 km, all the way from one side of the Earth to the other.

The Earth is flattened at its poles by about 0.3 per cent, Jupiter by about 6 per cent, and Saturn by a whopping 10 per cent. But the scientists now believe that protoplanets are flattened by ...