Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen in Germany have determined that a star known as Kepler 11145123 is the closest thing to a perfectly round sphere ever measured. The star, which is located 5,000 light-years from Earth, was studied with NASA’s Kepler telescope for 51 months, from 2009 to 2013. Using a technique called asteroseismology, astronomers were able to determine that the distant star’s equatorial and polar diameters differ by a mere 3.7 miles (6 km), even though the star is 1.86 million miles (3 million km) in diameter -- about twice as wide as the Sun.
Honoring a 17th-century astronomer:
Stars, planets, and other celestial bodies bulge slightly at their equators due to centrifugal force. Generally speaking, the faster these objects spin, the larger the bulge at the equator.
Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA in 2009 with the aim of discovering Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.
The telescope and star described above were both named after Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer best known for his formulation of the laws of planetary motion.
Discussion Comments
It might be worth mentioning also the most spherical object made by man - gyroscopic rotors in NASA Gravity Probe B spacecraft.
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