The Sun Is the Most Perfect Naturally-Occurring Sphere in the Universe
STEREO Image of the Sun NASA After 50 years of research, we've discovered a strange, beautiful fact about our Sun: it's more perfectly round than anything else in the natural world. It's not the roundest in a certain category; it's just the roundest sphere there is. If it were a beach ball, The Guardian writes, it would be a hair's width away from complete perfection. Most planets exhibit some sort of a bulge at their equator because of their rotations. Jupiter's spin, for example, makes it about 7 percent wider. So you'd naturally think the Sun shared some of those properties, but you'd be wrong--the bulge at the Sun's equator turned out to be relatively minuscule. The Sun is about 1.4 million kilometers across. The distortion at its equator? A mere 10 kilometers. The only thing we know of that's rounder is a manmade, artificial silicon sphere. Until recently, Earth's...