Gaia’s mission continues in the Milky Way, where astronomers monitor data confirming stellar earthquakes in the Milky Way.
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The Gaia mission records the sounds of interstellar earthquakes across the Milky Way
The Gaia galaxy-mapping mission in Europe recorded the sound of stellar earthquakes rippling across stellar surfaces like tsunamis and changing the shape of stars in a way that they can be detected from space around Earth.
According to the “Gaia” team, the sound that appeared in the video is not the exact sound emitted by the stars, but rather what scientists call “sonication”, that is, translating data into sounds, and the team behind the project had to do a lot of processing to make the experiment available to humans. .
“Humans can’t hear the real frequencies of these oscillation patterns, we’ve artificially multiplied them by a factor of 8.6 million to make them within the audible range of human ears,” astronomer at Catholic University Connie Aerts in Belgium said during an ESA press conference. “.
The “star sonication” was released as part of a large dump of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) “Gaia” mission, which measures the exact locations, distances from Earth, velocities and trajectories of two billion stars in our Milky Way.
The telescope, which has been in orbit since 2013, has been known to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way, Aerts said, and the discovery of stellar earthquakes has been a bonus.
Gaia also measures stars’ brightness levels, and in this data stellar earthquakes were found. “These vibrations make the stellar gas move up and down, and it changes the brightness of the star as a function of time, so it makes the stars twinkle in the sky,” Aerts said.
And the European Space Agency stated in a previous statement, that “Gaia” was “able to detect the inflation and contraction of stars, but the detection of these stellar earthquakes presents a greater challenge, stellar earthquakes, which spread across the surface of the star like a giant wave, make the surface move as it rotates.”
The astronomers said studying these stellar tremors could enable astronomers to better understand what’s going on inside stars.
“Blinking stars provide astronomers with a very powerful tool to study their internal physics and chemistry, like earthquakes on Earth,” said Aerts.
He continued, “Seismologists love earthquakes if they are not very violent because they allow us to understand what is happening inside our planet, and seismologists actually do the same, but for the stars.”
The latest edition of Gaia, the largest catalog compiled of information about stars in the Milky Way, contains information about thousands of these blinking stars.
Astronomers can use Gaia’s measurements to search for promising targets, which they can then observe in greater detail with other telescopes.
“Specialized telescopes for studying exoplanets such as NASA’s upcoming TESS mission or the European Space Agency’s upcoming PLATO are ideal for analyzing stellar earthquakes, and along with Gaia could open up a new gold mine in astronomy, which will reveal what makes these stars twinkle,” Ayers added. and vibrate.”