Supergiant Blue Stars Open The Doors To The Concert In Space

Since the dawn of humanity, the stars in the night sky have captured our imagination. We even sing nursery rhymes to the children reflecting on the nature of the stars: "Shine, shine, little star, how I wonder what you are". The telescopes can explore the universe, but astronomers have struggled to "see" within the stars. The new space telescopes allow astronomers to "see" the waves that originate deep inside the stars. Using asteroseismology, it becomes possible to study these stars, a technique like how seismologists use earthquakes to study the interior of the Earth.

Stars come in different shapes, sizes and colors. Various stars are like our Sun and live calmly for billions of years. The most massive stars, those that are born with ten times or more the mass of the Sun, live shorter and more active lives before exploding and expelling their material into space in what is called a supernova. The blue supergiants belong to this group. Before they explode, they are the metal factories of the universe, since these stars produce most of the chemical elements beyond helium in Mendeleev's Periodic Table.

For the first time, researchers have been able to "see" under the opaque surface of the blue supergiants. "The discovery of the waves in multiple supergiant blue stars was an eureka moment," says postdoctoral researcher Dominic Bowman, who is the corresponding author for this study: "The flicker of these stars had been there all the time, we just had to wait to the modern ones, space telescopes to be able to observe them, it's as if the stars of rock and roll had been acting all the time, but only now NASA's space missions could open the doors of their concert hall. Deriving the physics and chemistry from its deep interior, including the stellar core, these frequencies probe how efficiently metal is produced and how it moves in the factory. "

"Before NASA's Kepler / K2 and TESS space telescopes, few blue supergiants were known that vary in brightness," says Bowman (KU Leuven). "Until now, we have not seen these waves causing flashes and flashes on the surface of the blue supergiants. You need to be able to look at the brightness of an individual star for a sufficient time with a very sensitive detector before you can make a map of how changes with the weather ".

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190506124121.htm