The world of geometry is all around us. From snowflakes to broccoli, to the striped wallpaper in your grandma’s bathroom, geometry is at work in all of these things. However, one thing that we don’t very often see is something natural that is a perfect shape, for obvious reasons. But now, scientists have discovered an object that is so close to being perfectly round that it has been dubbed the roundest object known to the Universe and is called Kepler 11145123 (or KIC 11145123).
Kepler 11145123 is a star and is located around 5,000 light years away from us. It was discovered by astronomer Laurent Gizon from Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Gottingen in Germany and his team. To measure just how spherical the object has they used a technique called asteroseismology and soon found that this discovery was even more round than the sun. To try and figure out how this object got so round, the researchers used the oscillation of stars to calculate how much flattening or compression the sphere had. When objects in space spin on their axis, they are pulled in different directions by gravity and other centrifugal forces, and this is what causes round objects to lose their shape somewhat. And, the faster the object spins, the more it will disfigure.
The new star, Kepler 11145123 is a slow spinner but is more than double the size of the sun. This could be one of the reasons it’s so spherical, but scientists say that it’s even more round than it should be based on their calculations. But, Michael Byrne says “Using these waves to visualize the guts of the star, they found that KIC 11145123’s exterior layers are rotating faster than its core. This is what is likely causing the unusually round (or less ‘oblate’) shape – because of the disconnect between surface and core; the star is not spinning quite as much as may appear just by looking at it from the outside.”
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