Just like geologists use seismic waves caused by earthquakes to glean information about the rocky innards of our planet, astronomers use “sunquakes” to take a peek inside our closest star
astronomers discovered that the Sun was pulsating—expanding and contracting regularly every five minutes. As well as this main oscillation, they later found millions more, each with a unique rhythm. The oscillations were the result of pressure waves that had been bouncing around inside the Sun. As such, they carried with them valuable information about the gases and conditions inside the star.
This turbulence is the source of the acoustic waves that give rise to the Sun’s oscillations. While the seismic waves generated by an earthquake usually come from a point source in the Earth’s crust, the Sun’s oscillations are triggered by countless disturbances occurring throughout its convection zone. Like a bell, the Sun is continually ringing with the tones and overtones of the millions of oscillations.
Fortunately, Dr Aerts and her colleagues will not have to toil so hard in the future. Help for asteroseismologists is flooding in from an allied branch of astronomy—the hunt for exoplanets. Looking for planets beyond the solar system requires watching faraway stars for long periods of time and looking for slight changes in their luminosity. These changes can come either from planets transiting across the stars or from oscillations in the stars themselves.
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