Scientists Intrigued by Stars Singing Ancient Songs

Stars are constantly dimming and brightening due to their inner vibrations — and when those vibrations are converted into soundwaves, they become song. As a new study published in the journal Nature explains, scientists were able to learn just how much star brightness fluctuates during these "starquakes" by translating those light frequencies into sound waves. With data from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, a massive database of star information, researchers led by Australian National University astroseismologist Claudia Reyes focused in on 27 stars within the M67 star cluster. Sometimes referred to as the King Cobra cluster or the Golden Eye cluster due to its shape, M67 is considered the oldest nearby star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy. With stars similar in age and composition to our own Sun, Reyes and her international team of astronomers wanted to learn what kinds of "songs" these stars have to sing. These astronomy researchers learned that at a certain point in th ... Read full article.