From: utzoo!decvax!cca!HSC@MIT-MC@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.space Title: SPACE Digest V2 #263 Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2492 Posted: Fri Aug 6 06:28:33 1982 Received: Sun Aug 8 07:52:51 1982 From: Stewart CobbIn 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)