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ASTEROSEISMOLOGY

A high-tech lip reader for tight-lipped stars

Nature Astronomy volume 6, pages 20–21 (2022)Cite this article

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Unlocking the internal secrets of a β Cephei star with a state-of-the-art polarimeter may open up a greater understanding of whether a massive star eventually explodes in a supernova or collapses directly to a black hole.

Over the past 25 years, asteroseismology has been one of the fastest advancing and maturing fields in astrophysics. It is the art of listening to the oscillatory whispering of pulsating stars to infer their invisible internal structure. A corresponding example from everyday life is that one can hear whether tea is being poured into an empty, a half-empty or a full cup. The current technical cutting edge is to capture the star talk with space photometers because stars mutter in light. Daniel Cotton and collaborators1 recently added a completely different method that reads the stellar lips because stars change their shape when they pulsate.

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Fig. 1: A star distorted by non-radial pulsation.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany

    Dietrich Baade

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  1. Dietrich Baade
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Correspondence to Dietrich Baade.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Baade, D. A high-tech lip reader for tight-lipped stars. Nat Astron 6, 20–21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01545-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01545-3

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