asteroseismology tagged posts

Pleiades Star Cluster: Surprising variability

This image from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft shows members of the Pleiades star cluster taken during Campaign 4 of the K2 Mission. The cluster stretches across two of the 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that make up Kepler’s 95 megapixel camera. The brightest stars in the cluster – Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and Pleione – are visible to the naked eye. Kepler was not designed to look at stars this bright; they cause the camera to saturate, leading to long spikes and other artefacts in the image. Despite this serious image degradation, the new technique has allowed astronomers to carefully measure changes in brightness of these stars as the Kepler telescope observed them for almost three months. Credit: NASA / Aarhus University / T. White

This image from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft shows members of the Pleiades star cluster taken during Campaign 4 of the K2 Mission. The cluster stretches across two of the 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that make up Kepler’s 95 megapixel camera. The brightest stars in the cluster – Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and Pleione – are visible to the naked eye. Kepler was not designed to look at stars this bright; they cause the camera to saturate, leading to long spikes and other artefacts in the image. Despite this serious image degradation, the new technique has allowed astronomers to carefully measure changes in brightness of these stars as the Kepler telescope observed them for almost three months. Credit: NASA / Aarhus University / T. White

The Seven Sisters, as they ...

Read More

The Rotation Axes of Stars tell us about how they were Born

Numerical simulation of the fragmentation of a cluster of stars up to the formation of stars (left) with a zoom on the most central part of the cluster (right). The inclination axes of the masses similar to those observed by the Kepler satellite (in cluster NGC 6791) align in this simulation when the kinetic energy of the original cloud is comparable to the ambient turbulent energy. © E.Corsaro & Y.-N Lee

Numerical simulation of the fragmentation of a cluster of stars up to the formation of stars (left) with a zoom on the most central part of the cluster (right). The inclination axes of the masses similar to those observed by the Kepler satellite (in cluster NGC 6791) align in this simulation when the kinetic energy of the original cloud is comparable to the ambient turbulent energy. © E.Corsaro & Y.-N Lee

Using asteroseismology, an international team including CEA, CNRS and Université Grenoble-Alpes discovered a surprising alignment of the rotation axes of stars in open clusters, shedding light on the conditions in which stars are formed in our galaxy...

Read More

Starquakes Reveal Surprises about Birth of Stars in our Galaxy

The spins of about 70% of the red giant stars observed in the clusters were strongly aligned in a study by researchers including Dr Dennis Stello.

The spins of about 70% of the red giant stars observed in the clusters were strongly aligned in a study by researchers including Dr Dennis Stello.

A study of the internal sound waves created by starquakes, which make stars ring like a bell, has provided unprecedented insights into conditions in the turbulent gas clouds where stars were born 8 billion years ago. Astronomers used this asteroseismology approach to work out the orientation of the angle of spin of 48 stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The spins of about 70% of the red giant stars observed in the clusters were strongly aligned in a study by researchers including Dr Dennis Stello...

Read More

Listening to the Relics of the Milky Way: Sounds from Oldest stars in our Milky Way

Artist's concept of the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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

The M4 cluster (top) with sections showing white dwarf stars shown in the bottom left and right...

Read More