Astronomers have found that the star Kepler 11145123 is the closest to a perfectly round sphere ever measured, using NASA’s Kepler telescope and asteroseismology. The star is 5,000 light-years away and has a diameter of 1.86 million miles. It is named after 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler.
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 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 equatorial and distant star’s polar poles differ by only 3.7 miles (6 km), even though the star has a diameter of 1.86 million miles (3 million km), about twice the diameter of the Sun.
In honor of a 17th-century astronomer:
Stars, planets, and other celestial bodies bulge slightly at their equators due to centrifugal force. In general, the faster these objects rotate, the bigger the bulge at the equator.
Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA in 2009 with the goal of discovering Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars.
The telescope and star described above are both named after Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer best known for his formulation of the laws of planetary motion.
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