Astronomers measured pulses coming from the distant Delta Scuti stars, which are twice brighter than the Earth's sun. Delta Scuti stars rotate so rapidly that it slightly flattens, scrambling their pulsation patterns and produce what seems to be a chaotic pulsation at first.
Unexpectedly, these pulses were musical, and some even harmonize with other nearby stars. They pulsate in interesting ways that have so far defied understanding.
According to Daily Mail, it is the first time that harmonies have been measured from Delta Scuti stars. Tim Bedding from the University of Sydney and his team of astronomers recorded the pulsing patterns of 60 new Delta Scuti stars.
Stars are Musical Instruments
In an interview with ABC News, Bedding said that "stars are like musical instruments. They can play many notes simultaneously, and there are all different types of pulsations."
Using the data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was launched in 2018 to identify planets outside the solar system, Bedding and his team of astronomers were able to come up with their research.
They were surprised to notice some harmonized patterns emerge as they first expected that the pulsing patterns from the stars are just random noise. Bedding said that initially, they thought that the pulses would produce something that sounds like a cat walking on the piano playing random keys with no method.
"To use a musical analogy, many stars pulsate along with simple chords, but Delta Scuti stars are complex, with notes that seem to be jumbled. TESS has shown us that's not true for all of them," Bedding said.
Stellar pulsations are a common phenomenon observed through measuring variances in light waves emitted by a star. Many stars oscillate in rhythmic patterns because of the acoustic waves produced by burning hydrogen, or small waves produced as different bodies of gas in the star center pass through or near each other.
Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham told Sky News that, inside the stars, these pulsations cause the star's brightness to change every so often. Understanding a star's pulsations gives the astronomers the only way of creating a detailed picture of what the star looks like inside.
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Asteroseismology
The field of asteroseismology looks at how old a star is, and a star's condition and temperature. The discovery of pulsations is beneficial in astronomy in determining which stars are young or old as newer stars tend to burn at a relatively consistent rate. In comparison, older stars create more irregular pulses.
It is still a mystery how the Delta Scuti stars have formed a harmony, but one theory suggests that they could have come from the same larger gas cloud around the same time before diffusing through the universe.
But for Bedding, discovering the harmonized pulsations could also just a random chance. He said that the stars in the universe are oriented randomly, so whoever looks at that direction was lucky to have discovered the harmonized pulsations.
