ESA's Gaia Can Detect Starquakes, One of the Most Shocking Discoveries Revealed in Newly Released Spectroscopy Data

The data release 3 of the European Space Agency's Gaia contains new and enhanced details for nearly two billion stars in the galaxy.

As specified in a Phys.org report, the catalog comprises new information, including chemical structures, stellar temperatures, masses, ages, color, and speed at which stars are moving "toward or away from Earth."

Essentially, Gaia is a mission of ESA to create the most precise and complete multi-dimensional map of the Milky Way. This enables astronomers to restructure the Earth's home galaxy's structure and past evolution over billions of years and better understand the stars' cycle and our place in this universe.

Much of this information was shown by the newly released spectroscopy data, an approach in which the starlight is split into its constituent colors, similar to a rainbow. The data also comprises special subsets of stars, such as those that alter brightness over time.

Also new in this set of data is the largest catalog yet of binary stars, thousands of objects from the solar system like moons of planets and asteroids, as well as millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Galaxy.

Detection of Starquakes

According to a similar Mirage News report, one of the most astonishing discoveries that come out of the new data is that Gaia can detect starquakes. There are motions on the surface of a star that change the shapes of stars, something the observatory was originally designed and developed for.

Gaia already found radial oscillations before causing the stars to swell and occasionally shrink while retaining their spherical shape.

However, the ESA satellite has now spotted other vibrations, which are more like large-scale tsunamis. Such nonradial oscillations change the star's global shape and are more difficult to detect.

Gaia detected strong nonradial starquakes in thousands of stars. It also revealed such vibrations in stars that have seldomly been seen in the past.

A similar Satellite Evolution report said these stars should not have any quakes, according to theory, while Gaia did not see them at their surface.

Belgium-based KU Leuven's Conny Aerts said, "Starquakes teach us a lot about starts," remarkably, their internal workings.

A Surveying Mission

Unlike other missions targeting specific objects, added Aerts, the Gaia satellite is a surveying mission. Meaning, that while surveying the whole sky with billions of stars many times, this satellite is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would fail to detect.

This is one of Gaia's strengths, "and we can't wait for the astronomy to dive into" this new data to discover even more about the galaxy and its surroundings than they could have imagined, explained Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA.

A report about Gaia's new map of the Milky Way is shown on New Scientist's YouTube video below:

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