Jun 23, 2022
We Have Observed A Stellar Earthquake Never Seen Before
A form of shock that manages to change the shape of a star.
They called it “Starquakes” and that is “stellar earthquake”, but this immediately makes us think about the fact that a star may have a crust or some type of elements that make these “tremors” work. At the moment the debate is absolutely open on this event that shakes the stars in all respects and also changes its shape. Discovering this new phenomenon was the GAIA (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) satellite whose mission is to create a very detailed map of our galaxy. To understand how ambitious and huge this work is, when we have mapped 1 billion stars we will be 1% of the stars that make up our galaxy. Recently in a series of data collected by GAIA this anomaly emerged, a big surprise for astronomers also because Gaia was not designed to observe them in particular. Earthquakes distort the appearance of stars in a specific way, not just by inflating them evenly into a spherical shape. It is more difficult to detect these small irregular shape changes than to measure the entire changing size of the star.
“Previously, Gaia has already encountered radial oscillations that cause stars to swell and shrink periodically, maintaining their spherical shape,” ESA said in the release. “But Gaia has now also identified other vibrations that are more like large-scale tsunamis. These non-radial oscillations change the global shape of a star and are therefore more difficult to detect“.
Apparently this type of shock affects neutron stars a lot or it is probably much easier for us to observe them on this type of stars, such as magnetar
