Smallest star ever detected

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7098

 

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"it is just 16% larger than Jupiter. This is smaller than some known planets found beyond our solar system - or exoplanets."

The article affirms that is a star, not a brown dwarf, that could seem plausible. I wonder what place can have this little star in the HR diagram. the picture seems to indicate that is a red dwarf. Perhaps we should invent a new category to accomodate this star

 

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Hum,
OGLE-TR-122b is a M-dwarf star, the density is more than 50 times greater (M=0.092±0.009 Mo) than that of our own Sun.
(we know this cos` it transits around its solar-type primary every 7.3-days. )

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What I'd like to see is a star system consisting entirely of stars. I mean, one central star and many such dwarf stars orbiting it, just for the sights of it.

 

Multiple stellar systems do really exist, and in the observable universe there are at least 7*(10^22) stars, so the possibility of a system of the kind you say to exist is reasonable. I'd like very much to live in a planet with not only a Sun, but 5 or 6

 

Go to hell.

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I would go if i knew how to go there. Do you know the address? You know: Hell ain't a bad place

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Hmmm...

Sirius-B is smaller than Earth. Are white dwarfs not considered to be stars?

 

I don't know why they wouldn't be, Pete. The Chandra Chronicles, at the Chandra
x-ray observatories website, seems to imply even Venus, Jupiter, Mars and the moon
are stars! HeHe. (Quote taken from diagram on left of article)


"Sirius, Canis Major's Alpha star, is one of the brightest stars in night sky; only the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Mars are brighter."
http://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/0400/sirius_part2.html

 

I guess that what they have really found is the smallest main sequence star

White dwarfs are stars, and are smaller than Jupiter, as Pete noticed

 

wouldn't that be the short guy out of austin powers

 

What does 'star' mean, in technical usage?
Is it restricted to stellar objects undergoing fusion?

 

From the article:

I guess we get a little loosey-goosey with the word star. What about Neutron "star"?

 

The colours of Orion
© A. Vannini, G. Li Causi,
A. Ricciardi and A. Garatti
Stars come in lots of different colours.

The colour depends on the temperature of the star:

Hot stars are blue.
Cooler stars are red.
Hot stars can be as hot as 30,000 °C or more, but the coolest stars are only 1,000 °C.

The Sun is quite a cool, yellow star. It is about 6,000 °C.

The temperature of a star, and so its colour, depends on the amount of mass it has.

Very massive stars, tens of times the mass of the Sun, are the hottest, and smaller stars with less than half the mass of the Sun, are the coolest.

Although they are bigger, the hot, blue stars do not "live" as long as the smaller ones because they use up their nuclear fuel much more quickly


http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/astro/textb/stars/hotcold.htm

 

Lucas: I'd like very much to live in a planet with not only a Sun, but 5 or 6
Ss: Go to hell.
Lucas: I would go if i knew how to go there.
Gendanken: masturbate



I was there when we landed on the moon, by the way. And 145 extrasolar planets so far.........

 

Castor is a six sun system; the stars are arranged in pairs, two sets of bright stars and one set of red dwarfs. If you lived on a planet orbiting one of the bright pairs you might notice that the star in your sky was double, although it would be too bright to look at directly except at sunset; then you would see two stars next to each other close together in the sky.

The other pair of bright stars would be much smaller, but they would be visible during the day. Occasionally the second pair would appear to come close in the sky to the pair around which this hypothetical planet is orbiting, and would be lost in the glare. At night the second pair would turn the sky deep blue and obscure most of the other stars.

The third pair is relatively distant, and would only be visible as a pair of bright red stars at night.

 

Smallest star ever detected
All black holes are....
Well, if you don't tke into consideration the Swartzshield radius.....

 

Not all, Seeker, some black holes are just interstellar gas exploding into a black hole without the star stage. It is believed that so are "born" most supermassive black holes, like the one at the centre of our galaxy.

 

How come? Black holes can form thru the process of supernova, that is a star exploding in a very brutal way. They can also form by the mergers of black holes, or could even exist mini black holes, left as a remnant after the Big bang, but they don't form by the process of "interstellar gas exploding into a black hole"

 

When there is a huge concentration of gas, why not? Say, two giant gas clouds come together. The mass becomes so big it explodes invards. (This is purely my speculation on how these supermassive black holes may be born in other ways) The black hole in the centre of our galaxy is as large as all our solar system.

It also appears that when galaxies are first born it is when such gas cloud explodes invards, the centre becomes a supermassive black hole quazar and the rest of the not so concentrated gas (or most of it) becomes first stars in a galaxy.

p.s. That is not my speculation/theory, heard it on a BBC Horizon serie "supermassive black holes"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/massivebholes.shtml