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Astronomy

Where are Procyon's quakes?

Nature volume 430, pages 29–30 (2004)Cite this article

The acoustic waves that ripple through the Sun should exist in other stars too. But a search for these ‘starquakes’ in the nearby star Procyon has found no evidence of them.

More than a quarter of a century ago the Sun was found to be a variable star, the velocity of its surface gas varying with periods of around five minutes. A breakthrough came in 1979 with the first detection of large-scale oscillations on the solar surface1,2. These oscillations, or ‘starquakes’, are acoustic waves that penetrate the solar core — and hence provide information about the sound speed and, less directly, about the temperature and composition of the deep solar interior. The oscillations are believed to be driven by acoustic noise generated by the vigorous convective motion of gas near the solar surface. Such motion dominates the energy transport in the outer parts of the Sun and of other stars with surface temperatures below 7,000 K.

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Figure 1: Procyon in the winter sky.

A. FUJII/DAVID MALIN IMAGES

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Aarhus C, DK-8000, Denmark

    Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard & Hans Kjeldsen

Authors
  1. Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard
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  2. Hans Kjeldsen
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Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Kjeldsen, H. Where are Procyon's quakes?. Nature 430, 29–30 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/430029a

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