A new study led by UNSW Sydney researchers into a cluster of stars twenty seven hundred light years away reveals their stages of evolution through the ‘sounds’ they make. This discovery will allow scientists to map the history of the Milky Way and other galaxies, accelerating knowledge in the field of astrophysics.
Dr Claudia Reyes is the lead author of the study published in Nature Magazine and while undertaking her PhD at the UNSW School of Physics, she studied 27 stars in a cluster called M67. The stars in this stellar cluster were all born from the same cloud of gas four billion years ago.
She says these stars have similar chemical compositions but different masses which made them ideal for studying evolution in real-time, noting that while these stars are the same age, it’s their mass that gives away how quickly they’ve evolved. And, she adds, M67 is a very special cluster as it includes a broad range of ‘giants’, from the smaller, less evolved subgiants to red giants – those being the most evolved of stars.
This was the first time researchers could interrogate the ‘ringing’ across a cluster of stars to learn more about their interiors. They used the Kepler K2 mission as the primary way to observe, or ‘listen’ in this case.
