Let’s make this interesting and odd as possible: for decades, we thought that the Sun varies in size because of magnetic forces part of an 11-year solar cycle. Turns out, that’s all dead wrong.
The Sun’s shape doesn’t change. It’s round, yet unusually flat at the same time. In fact, it is so round that its roundness may have special attributes that warrant it doing what it does every Earth day. As Jeffrey Kuhn and his team at the University of Hawaii in Pukalani have discovered this, Kuhn went about and explained to Space what his findings meant and will mean:
“The peculiar fact that the sun is slightly too round to agree with our understanding of its rotation is also an important clue in a longstanding mystery,” Kuhn said. “The fact that it is too round means that there are other forces at work making this round shape. We’ve probably misunderstood how the gas turbulence in the sun works, or how the sun organizes the magnetism that we can only see at the surface. Finding problems in our theories is always more exciting than not, since this is the only way we learn more.
This is all too awesome. Via: Space
