by Astronomers have developed a new way to measure cosmic distances by listening to the frequencies of the “music” played by vibrating stars that act together as a vast orchestra of various cosmic instruments.
The results could help the European Space Agency (ESA) The Gaia satellite will better measure the positions and distances of some two billion stars World and movements and building a precise 3-dimensional map of the The Milky Way.
Scientists usually use a process called parallax, the apparent change in the position of an object when seen from two different positions, to measure the distance to different stars. They then measure the angles of the star itself, using Gaia’s position i space, try to triangulate. The problem, however, is that the more distant a star is, the smaller the apparent parallax displacement. And the smaller the parallax displacement, the more likely it is that minor systematic errors will creep in, potentially causing bias in the measurements.
A team of researchers, including scientists from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Bologna, are working to eliminate these errors. In short, they developed the most precise observations ever from over 12,000 oscillators giant red stars.
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“We measured the Gaia biases by comparing the parallaxes reported by the satellite with parallaxes of the same stars that we decided to use astrology,” Saniya Khan, a researcher at the EPFL Standard Candles and Dances group who led the latest work, said in a statement.
What is shaking Gaia?
The team’s analysis of stellar oscillations is called “asteroseismology”, and is similar to how geologists investigate the structure of the Earth by tracing patterns in earthquakes.
Khan and colleagues used the vibrations and oscillations of their sample stars, which can be seen as small changes in light intensity, by turning them into sound waves. After that, they were able to detect a spectrum of related sound frequencies. It was possible to convert these stellar sound frequencies into distance measurements.
“The frequency spectrum allows us to determine how far away a star is, which enables us to find asteroid parallax,” Khan said. “In our study, we listened to the ‘music’ of a large number of stars – some 15,000 light year taking place!”
The range of sounds also informed the team more about the stars in their sample, helping them pick out the cosmic instruments in this celestial orchestra.
“By analyzing the frequency spectrum of stellar oscillations, we can estimate the size of a star, as you can identify the size of a musical instrument by the type of sound it makes — think of the difference between the pitch of a violin and a cello ,” Andrea Miglio, one of the study authors and a scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, said in the statement.
When the team used this method to calculate a star’s size, its brightness could also be calculated. That brightness could be compared to how bright the star appears to us when we are standing here on Earth. This information was combined with observations showing the star’s temperature and chemical composition to calculate the final distance.
This calculated distance was then used to determine parallax, which could be checked against the parallax obtained by Gaia during its data collection. It was like a large-scale check on the accuracy of the ESA mission’s measurements.
“Gaia has increased the number of stars whose parallax has been measured by 10,000 thanks to a huge gain in accuracy over its predecessor, the ESA Hipparcos mission,” said Richard Anderson, head of the EPFL Standard Candles and Dances research group, in the statement. “Astrophysics is the only way we can check the accuracy of Gaia’s parallax across the entire sky—that is, for both low- and high-intensity stars.”
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Just like the stars it studies, the future could be bright for this astronomy-based method of remote sensing.
“Upcoming space missions like TESS and PLATO aim to detect and survey exoplanet it will use astrophysics and provide the necessary datasets across large regions of the sky,” Khan said. of the Universe and benefit from a plethora of subfields of it astronomy and astrophysics.”
The team’s research was published in September in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
