It's hot, it's bright and it also happens to be one of the most pefectly round things ever measured.
Jeff Kuhn and Isabelle Scholl of the University of Hawaii set out on a mission to investigate by using the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. What they found was that if the sun were to be shrunk to the size of a ball one meter in diameter it would be only 17 millionths of a meter out from a perfect sphere.
"For years we've believed our fluctuating measurements were telling us that the sun varies, but these new results say something different," said Kuhn. "While just about everything else in the sun changes along with its 11-year sunspot cycle, the shape doesn't."
The sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be much less than the width of a human hair.
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Source: Science Daily
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