Sound is a vibration diffused by one object which goes through a medium such as air until its heard by another object. The void of space, however, does not permit for sound to move between two objects in the same manner as it does on Earth.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US have, though, been able to pass this limitation to design ways of deciphering the signals produced by the cosmos, and have isolated a strange kind of resonance caused by blinking stars. These ‘vibrations’ are variations in temperature and brightness on the covering of the star and can be picked up by powerful telescopes and recreated through computer simulations.
Jacqueline Goldstein, a graduate astronomy student at Wisconsin-Madison said that the vibrations of the stars depend on their structure and size, just like a cello sounds like a cello due to its size and shape.
Astronomers Recreated The Sound of the Stars
Astronomers have to speed up these vibrations by up to a million times, so the human ear to hear them, and as a result, the waves are being known as ‘starquakes’ and the new area of study has been named ‘asteroseismology.’
When a star integrated hydrogen atoms into heavier elements, helium, for example, hot plasma or superheated gas creates a star’s flickering. Astronomers who study these sparklings can determine a star’s structure and how it will act over time.
Ms. Goldstein, who observes stars more prominent than the Sun, said that the one stars that explode and create black holes and neutron stars, also all the heavy chemicals in the universe are the stars that actually create planets and ultimately, new life.
This is not the first time the cosmos’ sound was recreated. In July 2018, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center utilized data gathered by the European Space Agency (ESA) to reconstruct the sound of the sun. NASA’s and ESA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) gathered information for over 20 years, and the Sun’s movements were also recorded, and the data was translated into a fascinating low hum.
