It is known that gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are so large in size that they can easily swallow our planet earth. But a newly conducted study has found that initial sizes of these gas giants were just a centimeter.

The new study published in the journal Nature points towards the pebble accretion theory that was first proposed by Swedish scientists three years ago, which actually was different from the original idea that ice and dust turned into large balls quite slowly, and then formed the nuclei of Jupiter and Saturn.

But researchers faced a problem as they do not had enough time before the sun's circumstellar disk would have run out of planet-forming materials for these gas giants to form in this pattern.

Furthermore during the study the scientists tweaked the model, allowing pebbles to interact and influence each other. The pebbles accumulated and then pushed the smaller protoplanets out of the way, letting them snowball in size.

They then put the concept in the computer models, and they came out with flying colors. The noted that the computer spitted out anywhere from one and four young gas giants, which certainly works with reality.

Researchers said they will use the similar model to see if the pebble accretion model can work for other celestial bodies as well. But so far the early results of their experiment have been good enough.

Jupiter is the largest gas giant and the largest planet in the Solar System as a result. It is the fifth planet from the sun and has a mass of one-thousandth of the sun. Saturn is the other gas giant, although it is smaller than Jupiter; still it has nearly 100 times the mass of Earth.