Artist’s concept of the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy team has reported the detection of resonant acoustic oscillations of stars in ‘M4’, one of the oldest known clusters of stars in the Galaxy, some 13 billion years old. Using data from the NASA Kepler/K2 mission, they studied resonant oscillations asteroseismology. These oscillations lead to miniscule changes or pulses in brightness, and are caused by sound trapped inside the stars. By measuring the tones in this ‘stellar music’, it is possible to determine the mass and age of individual stars. Thus asteroseismology can be used to study early history of our Galaxy.
The M4 cluster (top) with sections showing white dwarf stars shown in the bottom left and right. The blue circles indicate the dwarfs.
Dr Andrea Miglio, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the study, said: ‘We were thrilled to be able to listen to some of the stellar relics of the early universe. The stars we have studied really are living fossils from the time of the formation of our Galaxy, and we now hope be able to unlock the secrets of how spiral galaxies, like our own, formed and evolved.’
Dr Guy Davies said: ‘The age scale of stars has so far been restricted to relatively young stars, limiting our ability to probe the early history of our Galaxy. In this research we have been able to prove that asteroseismology can give precise and accurate ages for the oldest stars in the Galaxy ‘. Professor Bill Chaplin said: ‘Just as archaeologists can reveal the past by excavating the earth, so we can use sound inside the stars to perform Galactic archaeology.’
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2016/06/asteroseismologists-listen-to-relics-of-the-milky-way.aspx http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/06/06/mnrasl.slw102
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