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The transmission of gas waves from the core of a star to its surface affects the amount of light emitted and causes the star to flicker. Now, scientists convert stellar gas waves into music, and through these "songs", scientists can determine the amount of light emitted by a star.

(Noa Leach / tr. by Phil Newell)

Translation | Li Tiantian

Editor | Wen Jing

The original article is published in Science focus magazine No. 11, 2023.

Scientists have developed a new method to predict the inherent flicker brightness of stars and have even successfully simulated sounds from the core of stars. It sounds as if those massive stars are singing some strange and spooky songs.

The inherent twinkle of stars the stars we see on Earth twinkle because the light from the stars is distorted as they pass through the Earth's atmosphere. In contrast, the inherent flicker of a star is caused by the oscillation of its surface gas waves.

The gas wave originates from the nuclear reaction in the core of the star, and the gas wave moves from the core to the surface. In the process of moving, the gas wave will cause turbulence and chaos in the surrounding gas, increasing or decreasing the brightness of the star, thus forming the inherent flicker of the star. However, neither the naked eye nor the latest generation of powerful ground-based telescopes can observe the inherent flicker of such stars.

Recently, a research team led by scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois has released its results, saying that a new method has been developed to simulate gas waves from the core of a star to its surface. Based on the simulation results, scientists have successfully determined the inherent flicker of a given star for the first time.

An article published in the journal Natural Astronomy (Nature Astronomy) details the new method. The new method can help us understand in more detail the interior of massive stars (stars more than 1.2 times larger than the sun). In addition, this approach is expected to reveal how stars and galaxies form and evolve, and help us explore how the elements on which we live, such as oxygen, are produced.

"the core of a star is like the ocean, with rough waves," said Dr. Evan Anders, who led the study. "when gas waves reach the surface of the star, the star flashes. Maybe one day, astronomers will be able to observe this phenomenon directly."

The inner regions of stars are of great research value, so how did the team come up with the idea of studying the sounds of those stars?

Anders and his team made computer models of the results of three-dimensional simulations, and then used these models to calculate the intensity of flicker caused by gas waves of different frequencies and intensities. By converting these calculation results into a sound track, the motion of the gas wave can be shown visually.

However, because the frequencies of these gas waves are outside the range of human hearing, the songs emitted by the so-called stellar cores are actually the result of scientists'"translation" of gas waves-scientists must increase the frequency of gas waves. to be heard.

The scientists translated the inherent twinkling sound of the star into a clear and loud song. The song is accompanied by strange and reverberating pulses, indicating that gas waves are constantly moving from the core to the surface of the star.

By studying the simulated audio data, scientists combine processes on two different time scales: the initial turbulence caused by the collision of gas waves with the surrounding gas occurs within weeks, while the gas waves themselves reverberate for hundreds of thousands of years.

In the future, the new method developed by Anders and his team may be able to shift the attention of powerful telescopes to the inner region of the star, where heavy elements form and are of great research value.

"this study provides a more direct and simple way to search for star features that are so masked that they are generally not visible to the human eye or powerful telescopes," Wanda D í az-Merced, an astronomer who studies sound waves, told Scientific focus. "I congratulate their team!"

Different types of stars produce different sounds. Stars with large masses have different sizes or brightness, and their core gases produce waves of different frequencies and intensities. We can see this difference from the "songs" that scientists simulate based on the gas waves of different massive stars.

Large, massive stars (40 times the mass of the sun): at first it sounded like a burst shot with a ray gun in a sci-fi movie, then gradually turned into a low, resonant tremor (like the sound of a jet engine heard in the cabin of an airplane).

Medium-sized massive stars (15 times the mass of the sun): scientists describe the sound waves of medium-sized high-mass stars simulated by computers as "constant buzzing on eolian landforms".

A small, massive star (three times the mass of the sun): the twinkling sound of a small, massive star is the weirdest of the three, shrill, mournful, and a bit like a siren.

Based on the above characteristics, you can speculate about what kind of massive star the audio at the beginning of the article corresponds to.

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