HSC@MIT-MC@sri-unix (08/06/82)
From: Stewart Cobb <HSC at MIT-MC>
In regard to decvax!utzoo!miles's comments, I too remember an
article which stated that the sun was not a perfect sphere. Someone
had finally found a way to measure the eccentricity of the sun, and
found that it was indeed eccentric, by some small percentage (miles
says 0 .00019%). The point of the article I saw, however, was that the
extra belt of mass around the fatter sun produced some heretofore
unsuspected gravitational effects. Specifically, the extra mass
provided another explanation for the precession of Mercury around its
orbit. The explanation of the precession of Mercury, remember, was one
of the great triumphs of General Relativity. I'm not going to give up
GR until there's another theory that explains other phenomena as well
as GR does, but we might all keep in mind that one of the classical
tests of GR may have been invalidated.
Stewart (cobb@mit-mc)