Our understanding of stellar physics is being challenged by a small, dense object that is just a few thousand light-years away.
It is thought to be a neutron star, though it is an unusual one at that. It is the lowest mass ever measured for an object of its type.
The lightest star ever measured was.17 times the mass of the sun.
The minimum star mass predicted by theory is significantly lower than the one discovered. Either there's a gap in our understanding of these objects or we are looking at a strange star.
The densest objects in the universe are Neutron Stars. Between 8 and 30 times the mass of the Sun is left after a massive star. The outer layers of the star's material are ejected into space when it runs out of fuel.
electrons are forced to become intimate with protons long enough for them to transform into neutrons when the core collapses in on itself without the support of fusion.
The theory says that most of these objects could be as big as 2.3 solar mass and as small as 1.1 solar mass. It takes about 20 kilometers (12 miles) to pack all of this into a sphere, making it between 10 million and billions of tons.
The higher the star's mass, the denser it can become. The stars turn into dark objects. White dwarfs are less dense than neutron stars and have an upper mass limit of over one solar mass. The fate of our own Sun will be decided in this way.
The HESS J1731-347 is a supernova remnant that was previously thought to be 10,000 light-years away. It's difficult to study neutron stars because of poorly constrained distance measurement. It's difficult to get accurate measurement of the other characteristics of a star.
There was a second star discovered recently. A team of astronomer led by Victor Doroshenko of Eberhard Karls University of Tbingen in Germany found that the distance to HESS J1731-347 was much closer than thought.
The previous estimates of the star's other characteristics need to be refined. Doroshenko and his colleagues were able to refine the star's mass to an absolutely gobsmackingly low 0.77 solar mass after observing the X-ray light emitted by the star.
It's possible that it isn't a neutron star as we know it, but a hypothetical object.
"Our mass estimate makes the central compact object in HESS J1731-347 the lightest neutron star known to date, and possibly a more exotic object - that is, a'strange star' candidate," the researchers wrote in their paper.
A strange star is thought to have a larger proportion of strange quarks than a normal star. The particles that make up the particles are called quarks. There are six different kinds of quaks, called up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. There are two types of quarks: up and down quarks.
The theory says that the particles break down into their quarks in the compressed environment of a neutron star. Equal proportions of up, down, and strange quarks make up strange stars under this model.
Since the rulebook for neutron stars goes out the window when enough quarks get involved, there is no lower limit for strange stars. We can't rule out the possibility that this star is weird.
Physicists have been looking for quark matter for a long time. A strange star is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
The constraints on mass and radius can be used to improve the constraints on the equation of state of cold dense matter.
It appears to be a very intriguing object from an astrophysical perspective.
It's difficult to figure out how such a star could have formed. The dense object at the center of HESS J1731-347 is going to teach us about the afterlives of massive stars.
The research has been published.
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