Covering spheres of Banach spaces by balls

If the unit sphere of a Banach space X can be covered by countably many balls no one of which contains the origin, then, as an easy consequence of the separation theorem, X* is w*-separable. We prove the converse under suitable renorming. Moreover, the balls of the countable covering can be chosen as translates of the same ball. Research of V. P. Fonf was supported in part by Israel Science Foundation, Grant # 139/02 and by the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica of Italy. Research of C. Zanco was supported in part by the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica of Italy and by the Center for Advanced Studies in Mathematics at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.