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Most planetary bodies consist of numerous pieces of rock that have coalesced under the influence of gravity. You could imagine them as sandcastles floating in space. Their structure can be disrupted when the force acting on the individual 'sand particle' is larger than their mutual gravity, similar to the ocean tides on Earth, which result from the gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon, in space a planetary body that comes close enough to a star is subjected to the strong gravitational pulls of that star.