Its only this week that scientists have revealed that, 45 years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the planetoid, our closest celestial neighbor is not actually round. Ian Garrick-Bethell, who authored the study published in Nature, describes it as like a lemon with an equatorial bulge, or like a water balloon that flattens out as its spun. Garrick-Bethell and his team instead ascribed the shape to a process known as tidal heating, in which early orbital forces between the Earth and the moon caused friction in the latters interior, causing its crust to expand outward in certain places.
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