Shelly Palmer

We Were Totally Wrong About the Sun’s Shape Until Yesterday

Sun

For as long as we’ve bothered to care about heavenly bodies other than our own, we’ve thought that the size of the Sun varies throughout its 11-year solar cycles. Intense magnetic forces, the theory went, rendered it as malleable as a sturdy stress ball. That was a good theory, backed up by decades of data. It’s also totally wrong. What Jeffrey Kuhn and his team at the University of Hawaii in Pukalani have discovered, in fact, is that the Sun’s shape doesn’t vary at all. It’s rounder than we thought, sure, and flatter—if you can reconcile those two in your brain—but it’s also terrifically consistent. Ours is one resilient orb. Read the full story at Gizmodo.