'Like notes of a song': Astronomers discover rhythm akin beating of hearts among stars

A team of international astronomers including researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa detected a distinctive rhythm of life for relatively young stellar bodies which were a mystery for scientists until now. The scientists found a rhythm, like the beating of hearts, among the stars.

The findings are an essential contribution to the overall understanding of what goes on inside trillions of stars across the cosmos. Institute for Astronomy Assistant Professor Daniel Huber and School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology Professor Eric Gaidos co-authored the study recently published in the science journal Nature.

"The signals from these stars have been a mystery for over a hundred years. We knew that brightness variations in these stars are caused by sound waves traveling in their interior, but we just couldn't make any sense of them," Huber said.

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'Like notes of a song finally falling into place'

The international team at the University of Sydney used data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a space telescope used to detect planets around nearby stars. With the use of the telescope, the team could identify and understand the pulsation of 60 such stars, in addition to the brightness measurements of thousands of stars.

"NASA's TESS data has delivered precise detections in a much larger number of these stars than we had before. This has now finally cleared up the picture, and we were able to identify regular structures. It's like notes of a song finally falling into place to play a beautiful melody," Huber explained.

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The stars analyzed in the study are about 1.5 to 2.5 times more massive than the Sun and are known as Delta Scuti stars.

"Young stars like these are among the most intriguing and important objects in astronomy. They allow us to see how stars and their planets form and change with time much as the solar system did more than 4 billion years ago. They are a window into our past," said Huber. Observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea provided critical information during the study to explain the brightness variations of the stars recorded by TESS.

(With ANI inputs)