As of: March 6, 2024, 7:14 p.m
By: Bjarne Kommnick
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A research team has discovered a binary star system in the universe that hides two extremely astonishing records.
Frankfurt - A research team has reported two new records in the universe in a new study: the smallest star discovered and the fastest orbit between two stars - both top values come from the same binary star system.
The researchers published their results in a study in the journal
Nature Astronomy
.
Researchers discover the smallest star ever – only seven times the size of Earth
The binary star system was named “TMTS J0526” by the researchers.
It is located around 2,760 light-years from Earth.
One of the stars, J0526B, is a hot, tiny dwarf star with a radius just seven times larger than Earth itself,
iflscience.com
reports on the study.
This makes it the smallest star that researchers have ever been able to identify.
For comparison: Jupiter's radius alone is 11.2 times larger than the radius of Earth.
The sun is even 110 times larger than the Earth.
Recently, researchers also discovered a black hole of incredibly large dimensions.
The binary star system TMTS J0526 has the smallest known star in the universe and the shortest orbital period of two stars.
© Jingchuan Yu, Beijing Planetarium
Despite its small size, the smallest star ever would still weigh about a third of the mass of the Sun and is therefore 350 times as heavy as Jupiter.
Together with its star partner J0526A, the smallest star also sets another record: the two stars would completely orbit each other in just 20.5 minutes.
This is the shortest orbital period of all binary star systems known to mankind.
For comparison: It is known that the Earth takes around 365 days to orbit the sun.
Researchers will examine more than 27 million stars between 2020 and 2023
The observed star J0526A has a mass that is approximately 74 percent the mass of the Sun.
The main components are carbon and oxygen.
Both stars would be so-called white dwarfs.
They are the fate of stars, such as the Sun, that are not massive enough to go supernova and initially evolve into red giants before shedding their outer layers and exposing their extremely dense, degenerate core in a volume that is not much bigger than the Earth.
For the study, the research team observed more than 27 million stars between 2020 and 2023 using the Tsinghua University-Ma Huateng Telescope for Survey (TMTS) - the namesake for the binary star system.
No system was discovered to have a shorter orbital period than the binary star system TMTS J0526.
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The research results were confirmed by the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma.
The study also suggests that the two white dwarfs would deform each other in their orbit.
Accordingly, the gravitational pull would affect the smaller, brighter star and its brightness with each orbit.
Most recently, the Gaia telescope revealed data from half a billion stars.