In new research, found that there was a good correlation between the flicker of a star and its surface gravity.
Dancing in the Sun
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has been observing the Sun for five years. This is what year five looked like.
Inner Beauty
The Sun is incredibly bright, so how do we peer beyond its surface to its interior?
Stellar Noise, Stellar Sounds
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has stopped its initial run of collecting data in its search for new planets, but that doesn’t mean there will be no more new discoveries from that data. A good case in point can be seen from a recent article in Nature that demonstrates a clever way to measure the surface gravity of a star.
Give or Take
Think on this for just a moment. Kepler-93 is 315 light years away, and we know the diameter of the star to within the width of the Earth. We know the diameter of one of its planets to within 120 kilometers. That’s a distance you could travel in a bit more than an hour on an interstate highway. Give or take.
Star Dates
Determining the age of a star poses a bit of a challenge for astronomers. After all, stars exist over a timescale of billions of years, and they are light years away. We can’t use radiometric dating like we do for rocks and other objects on Earth. So just how do we determine the age of a star? It turns out that there are several ways, and it’s getting easier to do.
Song of the Sun
There’s a song of the Sun. It is produced by acoustic waves in the Sun’s interior, and the study of these waves is known as helioseismology.