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To: alexander_busek; The_Media_never_lie; ctdonath2

You know, I think you might be right on that. I didn’t look carefully enough at it earlier to notice the shadow along the right edge. I just assumed, that it didn’t have enough mass or gravity to make it more rounded. But even Earth isn’t perfectly round.
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“The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator.[95] This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 miles) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter.[96] Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth’s center of mass is the summit of the equatorial Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador. [94][97][98][99]

The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 miles), which is approximately 40,000 km/pi, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France.[100]

Local topography deviates from this idealized spheroid, although on a global scale these deviations are small compared to Earth’s radius”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Shape
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“Because of the combined effects of gravitation and rotation, the Earth’s shape is roughly that of a sphere slightly flattened in the direction of its axis. For that reason, in cartography the Earth is often approximated by an oblate spheroid instead of a sphere. The current World Geodetic System model uses a spheroid whose radius is 6,378.137 km [3,963.2 miles] at the equator and 6,356.752 km [3,950 miles] at the poles.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spheroid


44 posted on 10/04/2015 3:12:56 AM PDT by ETL (Too many idiots, not enough time)
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Nineteen moons are known to be massive enough to have relaxed into a rounded shape under their own gravity, and seven of them are more massive than either Eris or Pluto.

They are not physically distinct from the dwarf planets, but are not dwarf planets because they do not directly orbit the Sun. The seven that are more massive than Eris are the Moon, the four Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), one moon of Saturn (Titan), and one moon of Neptune (Triton).

The others are six moons of Saturn (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus), five moons of Uranus (Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon), and one moon of Pluto (Charon).”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#Planetary-mass_moons

45 posted on 10/04/2015 3:22:01 AM PDT by ETL (Too many idiots, not enough time)
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