Astronomers have been noticing the occurrence of something quite strange and supposedly unusual: glitching stars.
According to Futurism, these stellar glitches are huge variations in structure that happen within the star's cores. After digging into the phenomenon, astronomers have noted these glitches more than ever before.
Ohio State News also notes that upon analyzing data from NASA's Kepler telescope, researchers gained evidence that red giants, or stars dying out due to hydrogen depletion and are in their final phase, keep going through variations in their structure that has quite a large scale. These are also known as glitches that take place within their core.
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Stellar Glitches
A study published in the Nature Communications journal focused on such glitches. Ohio State News also notes how it is the first to conduct in-depth characterizations of observations regarding the deepest and core areas of these red giants.
Futurism notes that previously reported glitches were related to the star's rotation. However, the glitches observed in the study went beyond this, as they affected the stellar oscillations and even how sound waves that flew by behaved.
Red clumps, burning objects with helium in their core, carry equal luminosity. This enables astronomers to use such clumps as standard candles to understand the distance and even enclose galaxies. These red clumps are, thus, undeniably important when it comes to chart and knowing more about the universe.
Given their importance in understanding the cosmos, it is necessary to understand why some clumps go through confusing core structural variations.
Lead author Mathieu Vrard shared how, through the analyses of such variations, the team may use them to get the star's parameters and know more about the objects' accurate structure.
24 Out of 359 Red Clumps Found to Exhibit Stellar Glitching
The astronomers studied a sample comprising 359 different red clumps. Their analysis showed that 24 of these clumps showed signs that they had glitched at some point before. This takes roughly 7%, a remarkable portion of the scope.
The reason behind such glitches is still quite unclear. However, Futurism notes that one of the two prominent assumptions proposes that glitches occur as a normal part of the evolutionary cycle of a star. Most of the glitches that take place are hardly significant, so they mostly go unnoticed.
However, the findings of Vrard did not coincide with such assumptions. Such findings suggest that these glitches are momentarily eased by a physical process that is unknown and that intermittently alters the core's structure.
This phenomenon is still a mystery itself that astronomers can dig further into.
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