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posted by martyb on Friday July 14 2017, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the Shirley-Temple-was-even-smaller dept.

It's "small", it's dense, and it likes to fuse hydrogen. Meet EBLM J0555-57Ab:

The smallest star yet measured has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge. With a size just a sliver larger than that of Saturn, the gravitational pull at its stellar surface is about 300 times stronger than what humans feel on Earth.

The star is likely as small as stars can possibly become, as it has just enough mass to enable the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. If it were any smaller, the pressure at the centre of the star would no longer be sufficient to enable this process to take place. Hydrogen fusion is also what powers the Sun, and scientists are attempting to replicate it as a powerful energy source here on Earth.

[...] "Our discovery reveals how small stars can be," said Alexander Boetticher, the lead author of the study, and a Master's student at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and Institute of Astronomy. "Had this star formed with only a slightly lower mass, the fusion reaction of hydrogen in its core could not be sustained, and the star would instead have transformed into a brown dwarf."

The EBLM project III. A Saturn-size low-mass star at the hydrogen-burning limit


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @09:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @09:46AM (#539040)

    Also, because brown dwarfs cool forever, they eventually become a type of macroscopic dark matter, so it is important to know how much dark matter is trapped in the form of extremely old and cold brown dwarfs.

    More like dim matter.