Scientists Intrigued by Stars Singing Ancient Songs

Stars are constantly dimming and brightening due to their inner vibrations — and when those vibrations are converted into soundwaves, they become song.

As a new study published in the journal Nature explains, scientists were able to learn just how much star brightness fluctuates during these "starquakes" by translating those light frequencies into sound waves.

With data from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, a massive database of star information, researchers led by Australian National University astroseismologist Claudia Reyes focused in on 27 stars within the M67 star cluster.

Sometimes referred to as the King Cobra cluster or the Golden Eye cluster due to its shape, M67 is considered the oldest nearby star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy. With stars similar in age and composition to our own Sun, Reyes and her international team of astronomers wanted to learn what kinds of "songs" these stars have to sing.

These astronomy researchers learned that at a certain point in their lengthy lifetimes — anywhere between a few million and tens of billions of years old — stars, like people, get stuck in a rut.

As a press release from the Australian National University explains, an apparent midlife crisis leads to their wave fluctuations halting and being caught in a loop-like state. At that "plateau," as Reyes calls it, a star will start "repeating itself like a broken record, before resuming its progression."

"Stars have multiple layers, similar to an onion," the starquake expert explained in the school's statement. "We discovered that the plateau occurs due to events in a specific layer of the star and at specific frequencies that are influenced by a star’s mass and metallicity."

"This means we can predict when and at what frequency the plateau will occur during a star’s life cycle," she continued, "enabling extremely precise age estimates for stars currently in their plateau phase."

Unfortunately, neither the journal nor the university released recordings of any of the M67 stellar melodies they researched. Luckily, a video from the National Science Foundation — which, like all other American scientific endeavors, is being threatened by the new Trump administration — shared what some other star songs sound like.

Beyond getting the incredible opportunity to listen to the symphony of the cosmos, Reyes added that her team's discovery of this stellar fluctuation plateau will be a helpful astronomy tool moving forward.

"This research helps us better understand how stars evolve, and provides a new tool to estimate their age," she said in the university press release, "which is crucial for studying the evolution of our galaxy."

That's really awesome, of course – but we'd still love to hear the tapes.

More on stars: Astronomers Investigate Whether Dying Star's Blast of Deadly Gamma Radiation Will Hit Earth

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