Maybe the Sun is round after all

Many ears pricked up at two recent conferences when Henry Hill of the University of Arizona reported that he and his colleagues had looked for but not found any oblateness in the mass distribution of the sun. Hill announced these results at both the Fifth Cambridge Conference on Relativity held at Cambridge, Mass. on 10 June and the Seventh International Conference on Gravitation and Relativity held at Tel Aviv, Israel from 24 to 28 June. Hill and his colleagues—Paul D. Clayton, Doug L. Patz and Alfred W. Healy of the University of Arizona, Robin L. Stebbins of the High Altitude Observatory and James R. Oleson and Carl A. Zanoni of Wesleyan University—made their measurements at the Santa Catalina Laboratory for Experimental Relativity by Astrometry (SCLERA), a facility near Tucson that is jointly operated by the University of Arizona and Wesleyan University.