THE brightest star in the constellation Eridanus turns out to be the most squashed star ever found.
When astronomers measured the star, called Achernar, using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, they discovered that it was surprisingly flattened, with an equatorial diameter at least 50 per cent greater than the distance from pole to pole. 杏吧原创s say they鈥檙e puzzled about how the star, which is six times as massive as the sun, can be so squashed. One possible reason is that it could be rotating super-fast, with the equator鈥檚 surface spinning at 300 kilometres per second.