When Stars Twinkle, They Make Music

Astronomers are learning to decode the meanings hidden in stellar songs. [View in browser]( [Join Nautilus]( Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here.]( This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news—plus one full story, below, from The Porthole, our section for short sharp looks at science. Enjoy! DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week Q&A: What Does an Aging Congress Mean for a Much Younger Nation? Younger voters appear to be looking for candidates who share their worldviews. Now what? [EurekAlert!→]( How The ‘Groundbreaking’ Henrietta Lacks Settlement Could Change Research What the settlement over the ethical use of cells means for the scientific community. [Nature→]( Does an Emotional Connection to Art Really Require a Human Artist? Emotion and Intentionality Responses to AI- Versus Human-created Art and Impact on Aesthetic Experience AI art lights up our emotions, it’s true, but not as brightly as human-made art. [ScienceDirect→]( The James Webb Space Telescope Prompts a Rethink of How Galaxies form Astronomers: “Oh wow!” “What the heck is that?” [PNAS→]( We’re in a “Fog of War” as Experts and Amateurs Rush to Replicate Superconductor LK-99 Is a new superconducting material, which works at room temperature, too good to be true? [Big Think→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [JOIN TODAY]( From The Porthole ASTRONOMY When Stars Twinkle, They Make Music. Astronomers are learning to decode the meanings hidden in stellar songs. BY COREY S. POWELL With enough determination, people can turn almost anything into a musical instrument: a blade of grass, an array of water glasses, a field of flowing sand [dunes]( in Abu Dhabi, or a 3.5-acre system of [stalactites]( dangling from the ceiling of Virginia’s Luray Caverns. But why stop there? Evan Anders, a fluid dynamics researcher at Northwestern University, and his colleagues just transformed an entire star into a musical instrument. The researchers’ formal goal was to vibrate a star and listen to the response, as a way to study its inner workings. Lacking godlike powers, Anders and company could not conjure an actual, physical star for their sonic explorations. They had to make do with a three-dimensional model of a giant ball of gas and plasma, 15 times as hefty as the sun, and pump simulated waves through its layers. Then they indulged in a dose of whimsy, using their stellar instrument to crank out some celestial [tunes]( a passage from Gustav Holst’s The Planets and (natch) a snippet of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” “Dynamically, we want to know what’s happening inside massive stars,” Anders says, because they exert a tremendous influence on everything around them. When such stars are young, they shine hot and blue, like the members of the Pleiades. As they age, they become even more intense. Bright Rigel and Betelgeuse in Orion are prominent examples. Then things get really interesting. High-mass stars die in colossal supernova explosions that seed interstellar space with heavy elements. The oxygen in Earth’s air and the silicon in the ground originated in these stars. Without them, you literally would not be here. Stars are musical, ringing nonstop in response to the fusion energy pouring out of their cores. The dramatic life and death of a massive star is controlled by events deep in its core. That’s where fusion reactions synthesize new elements and keep the energy flowing—until the reactions fail, the outer parts of the star blow to bits, and the inner part collapses into a neutron star or a newly minted black hole. Outward appearances reveal only a little about what’s going on. To get the full story, you need to explore far beneath the surface. Sound turns out to be an excellent tool for doing just that. Astronomers have discovered that stars are highly musical, ringing nonstop in response to the fusion energy pouring out of their cores. When all those good vibrations wriggle to the top, they make the star flicker slightly, by about one part in 1 thousand. That innate “twinkling” provides outward evidence of the processes generating the waves hundreds of thousands of miles below: sound translated into light. [Like the story? Join Nautilus today]( The challenge for Anders and his team is that stars play many tunes all at once. Within all that noise, they wanted to pick out one specific tone, the rumbling of convection in the core. Waves from the core could reveal crucial information about the processes that cause massive stars to blaze and, eventually, to self-destruct. So Anders and his colleagues fired up their computers, strummed the cores of their virtual stars, and listened carefully for that single, telltale sound. “It’s like we put our star in a recording booth and measured the waves coming out of the center,” he says. The resulting jam session, recently [published]( in Nature Astronomy, offers a remarkable cross-section examination of a giant star, showing how sound waves travel through regions that we could never observe directly. One frustrating thing that Anders learned in the process is that stars are not well designed for high-fidelity listening. When he played the sound of the core through the star’s overlying layers, he found that the waves got horribly muffled as they travel, “like if you put a band in a crappy bar or some really bad venue,” he says. By the time the waves from the core reach the surface, Anders determined, they are so feeble that they cause the star’s brightness to vary by just one part in 1 million. Today’s telescopes aren’t accurate enough to pick out that one wave pattern from the cacophony of other sounds that stars generate; we can’t eavesdrop on stellar cores just yet. But now we know what to look for with tomorrow’s telescopes. Anders and his team also created a wonderfully detailed model of how sound waves travel through a star. That model could be useful to other researchers—or, in principle, it could allow anyone to play music through a star. Maybe their stellar instrument could become an online app, I suggest. “That’s actually a really good idea,” Anders laughs. The acoustics might be terrible, but who could resist hearing Prince’s “Baby I’m a Star” or Pitbull’s “Fireball” on the largest (yet) soundstage in the universe? Lead image: cddesign.co / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [Is that really your boss on the phone?]( • [The BigPicture 2023 World Nature Photography finalists]( P.S. A recent study showing people are moved by computer-generated art is a subject dear to Arthur I. Miller’s heart. Miller, a philosopher of science and author of books The Artist in the Machine, has been explaining the powers of AI art to readers for more than a decade, long before the controversial subject moved into the mainstream. In a Nautilus article, [“I Am Not a Machine. Yes You Are,”]( Miller, with a sly smile, told us, “I think if we teach machines to be creative, then they’ll be beneficent toward us, rather than just keeping us around as household pets.” Today’s newsletter was written by the Nautilus Editors [Nautilus TikTok]( SOCIAL MEDIA Meet Nautilus' New TikTok Ocean Correspondent, Nate Spada We are thrilled to announce our partnership with preeminent scientific research documentarist and TikTok educator Nate Spada. He will be joining the Nautilus team as our new [TikTok]( ocean correspondent. Named a “part-time lumpfish influencer” by The New York Times in 2022 for his TikTok videos about bioluminescent lumpfish, Spada is presently a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studying toxin-producing algae blooms and their effects on ecosystems and earned his Master’s degree in Marine, Estuarine, and Freshwater Biology at the University of New Hampshire. Spada will exclusively share his comedic reports on his oceanic endeavors with the Nautilus community in real-time. Follow Nautilus on TikTok at [@nautilusmagazine]( to watch Spada’s observations on ethereal eels, Bering Strait sunsets, and more. [Follow Nautilus on TikTok]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us?subject=&body=) your thoughts on today’s note. Plus, [browse our archive]( of past print issues, and inspire a friend to sign up for [the Nautilus newsletter](. 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