The strange quarks that make up a neutron star are so compressed that it could be so small.
Alex Wilkins is a writer.
There is a yellow and white remnant of a supernova.
The man is Victor Doroshenko.
The lightest star ever found, at 0.77 times the mass of the sun, doesn't fit with our understanding of how stars form. It might have something like strange quarks.
A nova is when a star has spent its fuel and collapses under its own gravity, leaving behind a dense core. Our understanding of the process shows that the minimum mass left behind can be more than twice that of our own sun.
It was thought that having a carbon atmosphere made the stars appear smaller than they really were.
Victor Doroshenko and his colleagues at the University of Tbingen in Germany used data from the European Space Agency to estimate the distance from one of these objects. Without a carbon atmosphere, its size can be explained. It is thought that the object is around 0.77 times the mass of the sun.
The researchers were able to measure the star's distance from Earth because it had a shell of dust illuminated by a regular star. The group used models to estimate the mass and radius of the star.
According to Doroshenko, if we look at the mass of the stars when they are measured precisely, they are all over the sun. A new theory of how they form will be needed to understand why this object is so small.
An alternative reason for its low mass could be that the star is made up of quarks that are in a compressed state, or a mixture of quarks and neutrons, but more data needs to be gathered to understand what it is made of.
There is a puzzle about how the 0.7 solar mass neutron star began its life and where it came from. It is much smaller than we would have expected.
Nature Astronomy is published in a journal.
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