All stars are roundish in shape(give any tech name).?

Question

Do you agree? If yes when they shine in night sky we must be able to see only a part of them..how much and why? do you have a theory or theories for this?

Answer 1

not sure I really understand all of your question, but here is my take:

all massive objects in the universe are roundish in shape, because this is the shape that minimises the gravitational potential energy.

how perfectly round they are, once they are massive enough (i.e., say, the mass of the Moon), depends mainly on how fast they rotate on themselves.

Some stars, and some special stars known as "neutron stars", rotate very quickly and therefore look much more flattened.

Even our good old Jupiter has a bulge because it rotates quite fast (one turn in a little under 10 hours, so a point on its equator rotates about 27 times faster - I'm talking mph - than a point on the Earth's equator).

And of course our Sun rotates in about 25 days (a bit faster at the poles - remember this is not a solid object).

about what part of a star we see? Well if a star is quite distant (most are), and if it does not rotate, then we will obviously see only one side of it. But as most stars do rotate, we get to see it all don't we?

Hope this helps a bit

Answer 2

Roundish in Shape = Spherical (a sphere like object)

Yes they are all spherical from a distance as they have a central point of gravity and all the matter attracted to this central point basically orbit it in a circular motion until they become attached to the central point of gravity and becomes part of the star. Whereas close up the surface of a star is definately not spherical - a star throws out huge solar winds (called promenances) which litter its surface thus making the surface of a star (when close up) spherical yes, but with lots of imperfections.

Answer 3

if your asking are all stars spherical then the answer is no. No , because of the gravitational pull exerted by other nearby large masses.
They mostly appear roundish to us as we only see the point of light that reaches us from that start , light that has radiated away from that star uniformerly in all direction.
Are they always roundish or spherical, well no , some stars for a brief period of time can be oblong i.e when they are being pulled into a black hole but they don't exist in that state for too long

Answer 4

The technical name for the phenomenon is self-gravitation..A body in hydrostatic equilibrium under its own gravity must necessarily be a sphee. If it rotates , it will depart from sphericity; it will become an oblate spheroid ( Flattened at the poles.)

Answer 5

Yes. But they aren't uniformly distributed (they 'clump up' in galaxies) so we only see part of them

In any event, we'd only see the side that was facing towards us.


Doug