How to Find the Smallest Stars in the Universe
While looking for exoplanets, astronomers discovered the tiniest star ever found, just slightly bigger than Saturn.
For astronomer Alexander von Boetticher, false positives in data are actually a good thing.
That’s how von Boetticher and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge discovered the smallest star ever measured. The star showed up in data from a British-led mission known as the Wide Angle Search for Planets, or WASP. WASP looks for potential exoplanets by looking for dimming in the this way. Sometimes, the source of the dimming turns out to be something else entirely. “Every now and then, instead of finding an exoplanet orbiting some star, it actually finds a very small star that’s orbiting a star,” von Boetticher said.
