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Strange ‘starquakes’ discovered by galaxy survey — Analysis

On Monday, the European Space Agency (ESA), through its Gaia satellite observatory, released a treasure trove of data. “starquakes”On thousands of stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy

According to astronomers, the phenomenon looks more like an earthquake that shakes the earth’s crust than a star-scale tsunami. However, neutron stars are capable of generating powerful quakes.

The newly observed oscillations provide a hint of what is happening under the star’s surface, analogous to the way seismologists use tremors on Earth to deduce its internal structure.

Conny Aerts is an astronomer who was part of the research team. “Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars.”

ESA released this video. “sounds”The starquakes. They are not actual soundwaves but are instead a “sonification”Some of the data collected from the space probe, its two telescopes.

“We artificially multiplied them by a big factor of 8.6 million to bring them into the audible range of [human] ears,”Aerts made the announcement during a Monday press conference.

Gaia, an ESA spacecraft, floats near the Earth-Sun Lagrange-2 point. This spot is approximately 1.5 million km from Earth. It is shielded against solar radiation by Earth’s shadow, and the gravitation of both bodies balances it. It allows Gaia to collect data without the Sun’s interference and maintain its position using just a small amount of energy.

In 2013, the space observatory launched and was tasked to map our galaxy with extreme precision. The observation “starquakes”The third set of mission data was subset. It includes the chemical compositions of stellar temperatures, colors and star colors. This dataset also contains the most comprehensive yet catalogue of binary stars and thousands of other objects from our system. It also provides scientific information.

“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a survey mission. This means that while surveying the entire sky with billions of stars multiple times, Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss,” Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia, remarked.

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