“roundest natural object ever observed in nature” — what a superb superlative

Originally shared by Ciro Villa

Astronomers discover a star about 5000 light years away, Kepler 11145123, that is the “roundest natural object ever observed in nature”

“Stars are not perfect spheres. While they rotate, they become flat due to the centrifugal force. A team of researchers around Laurent Gizon from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen has now succeeded in measuring the oblateness of a slowly rotating star with unprecedented precision. The researchers have determined stellar oblateness using asteroseismology – the study of the oscillations of stars. The technique is applied to a star 5000 light years away from Earth and revealed that the difference between the equatorial and polar radii of the star is only 3 kilometers – a number that is astonishing small compared to the star’s mean radius of 1.5 million kilometers; which means that the gas sphere is astonishingly round.”

http://phys.org/news/2016-11-distant-star-roundest-nature.html

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