We often look up to stars and feel at peace,
but stars are actually insanely turbulent
and chaotic celestial things.
And we use that chaos to learn more about
how our universe works.
We’ve seen stars eat other stars,
witnessed stellar flares,
and white dwarves on the verge of a supernova.
BUT... we haven't fully grasped what’s actually
going on inside the core of a star.
Observing the interior of a star is pretty
much impossible at the moment…
so, scientists are looking at a phenomenon
happening on the surface of stars to better
understand their internal structure: starquakes.
Similar to earthquakes here on our planet,
starquakes are tremors or waves that occur
on neutron stars and other massive bodies.
Most stars are balls of plasma, but
neutron stars are super dense so they have
a crust -- neutron star crusts are 10 billion
times stronger than steel.
So when a star rotates quickly, the crust
is under pressure from gravity and that fast
rotation, causing it to bulge out.
If the structure keeps twisting, it can rip
the crust open, and that creates a starquake.
The resulting release of energy is vast beyond
our wildest imaginations.
Starquakes are a reminder that space is violent
and metal as hell.
The biggest starquake ever detected was from
a magnetar -- which is such a bad ass name.
They’re a class of neutron star with the
most intense magnetic fields in the entire
universe.
One starquake on a magnetar released more
energy in a tenth of a second than our sun
does in 150,000 years.
That’s a metric [bleep] ton of energy.
If the explosion had been within 10 light
years of us, experts say Earth could have
suffered a mass extinction.
Phew.
Another cool thing, those starquakes emit
frequencies that were detected by the Kepler
Space Telescope and scientists interpreted
them for our ears.
The reason astronomers looked into this, is
because some cosmologists believed stars were
just out there… not really organized.
Starquakes were used to prove otherwise.
In a recent paper, An international team of
astronomers studied starquakes from 48 red
giants in two ancient star clusters.
And by measuring the waves from these starquakes,
they found 70% of the stars had spins that
were aligned with one another.
It proved asteroseismology can be a successful
tool to understand the conditions of stars,
and discredited these theories that stars
were randomly oriented.
Studying the vibrations from stars is very
similar to what seismologists do to understand
the core of our own planet.
For example, if you want to study the Earth’s
interior, we can’t just drill a hole into
the center and find out what’s going on.
Same thing goes with stars.
We can’t go in and grab a piece of a star’s
center and study it.
But, the waves created by those quakes can
be measured.
And by measuring the oscillations coming to
and from the center of the star, we can understand
it's physical conditions, the size of its
center, and more about its origin story.
It’s pretty wild that we can use the internal
hum of stars that are light years away to
figure out how our universe formed billions
of years ago!
More research is happily needed!
So next time you look up to the stars, remember
you've actually got front row seats to a celestial
Magnetar concert.
By the way, did you know that stars are also
related?
Scientists found the family tree of our sun
and it turns out, it's got siblings.
Check out the fam here.
Have a science question?
Let us know down in the comments, make sure
you subscribe for more Seeker and thanks for
watching.
