Smallest known star discovered, only 7 times larger than Earth – 2024-08-04 02:40:41

2024-08-04 02:40:41

It is a hot subdwarf about 2,760 light-years from our planet, with a mass one-third the size of our sun and burning helium at about 2,225 degrees.

A group of scientists has detected an exotic binary system that hosts the smallest star ever discovered, with a size only 7 times larger than that of Earth and smaller than that of Saturn.

It is a hot subdwarf about 2,760 light-years from Earth, according to an article published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy by the team of researchers, led by Chinese experts and composed of scientists from the United States, Australia and Europe.

Experts have named the star TMTS J0526B and say it has a mass one-third the size of our sun and burns helium at around 2,225 degrees Celsius.

According to the study, the star and its companion, J0526A, which is too faint to be observed directly, orbit each other every 20 minutes.

“While J0526A is invisible to the telescope, we know it exists because, among other things, it is so dense that its gravitational pull deformed J0526B, causing it to take on an egg shape,” the researchers said, as quoted by the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on Monday.

For the research, the Tsinghua-Ma Huateng Telescope had obtained photometric data of more than 27 million stars through 2023, continuously searching for transient objects in one or two patches of the sky each night.

The researchers confirmed what was observed by the Tsinghua-Ma Huateng Telescope with larger telescopes such as the Keck-I in Hawaii (United States) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias, in the Canary Islands.

Experts believed that red dwarfs, the most common type of star in the Milky Way, were the smallest stars in the universe.

In 2017, researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom discovered EBLM J0555-57Ab, the smallest red dwarf ever observed, located 600 light-years away and slightly larger than Saturn.

Source: GLOBE VISION