These 'ocular features' last only a few tens of millions of years, astronomer Michele Kaufman, who reported the discovery in 2016, said in a statement. This eye-shaped feature is actually a huge stream of stars and dust, produced when IC 2163 (at right in image) brushed against another spiral galaxy, NGC 2207 (left).

See if you can name these much more normal looking shapes here.(Image credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI))Įver feel like you're being watched? The disk of spiral galaxy IC 2163 seems to peer out into space with an enormous eye. The shapes of their shells are mono-monostatic bodies, allowing them to roll over a lot easier when they get flipped upside down onto their shells. Another example of a mono-monostatic body is one of those tilting toys that gets up every time you try and tip it over.Īnyway, the fun part of the Gömböc is its relation to tortoises. Being mono-monostatic means that when it’s on a flat surface it has exactly one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium (meaning the net forces on the object are zero). The Gömböc is the first time a mono-monostatic body has been realized in physical space. That means if you made a napkin ring out of the Sun it would have the same volume as a napkin ring made out of a billiard ball. No matter the radius of the sphere, the resulting napkin ring will always have the same volume, because the volume of a napkin ring is dependent only on its height and not its radius. So if you core a sphere, ergo you cut a cylinder out of the middle, you get what looks like a napkin ring.

Napkin RingsĪre napkin rings weird on their own? No, but they do have a problem named after them. It’s not a weird shape but it’s a funny name. Then all details are simplified into oblivion until everything is just like… a letter with a color.Īnyway the shape of your iPhone’s app icons has a name. You know how every part of corporate graphic design is going for simple and single-colored designs (probably also pastel colored?) where all edges and corners are rounded to make you think of a square but not really be a square. The next level rhombicosidodecahedron is a truncated rhombicosidodecahedron, whose faces are 12 decagons (10 sided polygon), 30 octagons, 20 hexagons, and 60 squares. This monster of a shape was named by Johannes Kepler as a shortened form of “truncated icosidodecahedron rhombus”. 20 of them are triangles, 30 are squares, and 12 are pentagons. Every single one of its faces are made of regular polygons. Because some of these shapes will make you ask “why?”Įnter the rhombicosidodecahedron. Once you get into weird shapes you start to remember why you can study geometry for a living. That makes a hexagram–but you might know it as a Star of David.

You can make a regular star polygon by taking an equilateral triangle and laying another one on top of it upside down. Star polygons can be made by overlaying shapes on top of each other. A cube is a type of skew polygon, but it’s a type of octagon instead of a rectangle. The former just means not all the shape’s points are on the same plane (it’s in 3-D). Regular polygons can also be skew or star. That’s the flat way you probably imagine a shape. You’re probably most familiar with regular polygons in their convex form. All four sides are the same, and all angles are 90 degrees. So all the sides are the same length and all the angles are equal in measure. A regular polygon is a shape where all sides and angles are equal. This does give us a chance to talk about regular polygons. It’s just a polygon with 12 sides, we’re bringing it up because knowing what a 12-sided shape was called was like the ultimate trivia fact to have on hand in elementary school. Honestly the dodecahedron isn’t really an interesting shape. But what are some weird shapes? What’s the weirdest shape? Dodecahedrons and Regular Polygons Maybe the weirdest one was a hexagon or something. Most of those shapes were like… normal though. Specifically the brightly colored ones you would like slide around on your desk or whatever. Shapes are weird, but we all probably have memories identifying squares and circles from drawings or like little blocks.

Names of weird shapes