Australian astronomers have found a potentially perfectly round object. It is a sphere in our own Milky Way that resembles a soap bubble. It is not clear what the sphere is made of or how it was formed.
The object has been named Teleios by the astronomers, after the ancient Greek word for perfection. It is most likely a remnant of an exploding star, or a supernova.
The sphere is located in the Milky Way, but the distance to Earth is difficult to calculate. It is not certain where the object begins. The researchers write that the distance to Earth is between 7,000 and 25,000 light-years. That would mean that the diameter of the sphere is 46 to 157 light-years.
The research of the scientists will soon be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, which is published by Cambridge University. The researchers cannot yet explain how the perfect spherical shape was formed. They want to do more research on that.
Stars and explosions are often almost perfectly symmetrical. They do not have to deal with air pressure in space and can therefore expand in all directions. They also rotate very slowly (or not at all) around their axis, so they do not flatten like planets and moons.
But truly perfectly round objects are very rare, because there are almost always other objects nearby that pull on them with their gravity. Our sun is one of the roundest objects we know. According to research, the sun is a 99.9992 percent perfect sphere.