"Discovery of Smallest Star and Ghostly Companion by China-Led Research Team"

A China-led research team has discovered the smallest star ever detected, a hot subdwarf just seven times the size of Earth, along with its larger white dwarf companion, using the Tsinghua University-Ma Huateng Telescope for Survey. The star, TMTS J0526B, and its invisible companion, J0526A, orbit each other every 20 minutes, and their existence supports a theory proposed by Chinese astronomers two decades ago. The finding offers the first direct observational evidence of such a unique binary system, and the researchers expect that the next generation of space-based gravitational wave detectors could detect the system's gravitational waves.