The Gaia space observatory has recorded strange and unexpected stellar earthquakes caused by catastrophic events occurring in the outer shells of stars, reminiscent of earthquakes occurring on Earth. CNN.
“Stellar earthquakes can tell a lot about stars, especially about their inner workings. Conny Aerts, a professor at the Institute of Astronomy at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, is a member of about four hundred other Gaia collaborations. He describes stellar pulsations in their upper layers – “large-scale tsunamis” that temporarily change the shape of stars. Gaia was not originally intended to study this phenomenon, but was able to detect powerful shifts on the surface of thousands of stars, including stars for which stellar earthquakes have rarely been observed before. He had detected radial oscillations (movements that radiate from a common point and cause some stars to grow and contract periodically while maintaining their spherical shape), but the newly discovered oscillations were no longer radial.
Unusual starquakes are among many other discoveries made by Gaia, which was launched in 2013 to create “the most accurate and complete multidimensional map of the Milky Way,” based at the L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million km from Earth. The European Space Agency has released the third set of data from the space observatory, revealing descriptions of nearly 2 billion stars in the galaxy. The data collected by Gaia includes new information about the chemical composition of stars, their temperature, mass and age, and the rate at which they move toward or away from Earth. In addition, detailed information has been published about the properties of cosmic dust that fills the space between more than 150 thousand asteroids and stars in the solar system. Special issue of the magazine Astronomy and Astrophysics About 50 scientific papers are published based on Gaia data.