When we look up at the night sky on a full moon night, we see a round, bright circle. The moon looks round, but is it really a perfect sphere?
VERDICT
FALSE
The moon is a spheroid, not completely round but like a slightly flattened ball (with flattened poles).
There are strong forces that pull it in different directions. For instance, lunar rotation causes it to bulge at the equator, and tidal forces between the Earth and the Moon result in bulging at its nearside (the lunar hemisphere that always faces Earth) and farside.
Even Earth is not a perfect sphere, but rather an irregularly-shaped ellipsoid (imagine a “stretched” sphere). Having said that, its deviations from a sphere are relatively small. And still, a far cry from being flat!
References:
1: https://www.almanac.com/moon-round
2: https://eos.org/research-spotlights/how-did-the-moon-get-its-shape
