Strange and unexpected tsunami-like earthquakes — movements in the crusts of stars similar to the earthquakes we experience on our planet — have been revealed by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space observatory.
The unusual earthquakes are among several new discoveries made by Gaia, a mission launched in 2013 to create the “most accurate and complete multidimensional map of the Milky Way”.
On Monday, ESA released its third batch of data from the spacecraft, revealing new details about nearly 2 billion stars in our galaxy.
“Earthquakes teach us a lot about stars, especially their inner workings. Gaia is opening a gold mine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars,” said in a press release, professor at the Institute of Astronomy of KU Leuven, Belgium, and member of the Gaia mission, made up of 400 researchers working on the data from the Earth. project, Conny Aerts.
The agency described the stellar vibrations detected by Gaia as “large-scale tsunamis” that changed the shape of celestial bodies.
Gaia was not originally designed to detect the phenomenon, but it was able to discern strong motion on the surface of thousands of stars, including some where earthquakes had rarely been seen before.
Previously, Gaia had detected radial oscillations—movements diverging from a common point—that caused some stars to periodically swell and shrink, maintaining their spherical shape. The newly discovered oscillations were not radial.
Gaia is uniquely positioned about 149,668 kilometers from Earth in the opposite direction from the Sun. The spacecraft carries two telescopes that can scan our galaxy from a location called the Lagrange 2, or L2, point. At this point, the spacecraft is able to remain in a stable point due to the balance of gravitational forces between the Earth and the Sun.
This also means that the spacecraft is not interfered with by Earth’s light and can use the minimum amount of fuel to remain in a fixed position. The viewpoint allows Gaia to have unrestricted views and continuously scan our galaxy.
“With this incredible database, we can build a comprehensive picture of the Milky Way and delve into its incredible formation history, seeing direct evidence of past violent interactions with other galaxies and internal attacks of intense star formation along the spiral arm. Milky Way),” said Nicholas Walton, a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and a member of the ESA Gaia collaboration, in a statement.
Much of the latest information about the Milky Way has been revealed by Gaia’s newly released spectroscopy data, resulting from a technique in which starlight is split into its constituent colors, like a rainbow.
The data collected by Gaia includes new information about the chemical composition, temperatures, mass and age of stars, as well as the speed at which they approach or depart from Earth. Detailed information about more than 150,000 asteroids in our Solar System and space dust — what lies between the stars — has also been released.
“Chemical mapping of Gaia is analogous to DNA sequencing of the human genome,” said George Seabroke, senior research associate at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, in a statement from the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The more stars we know about chemistry, the better we can understand our galaxy as a whole. Gaia’s chemical catalog of six million stars is ten times larger than previous terrestrial catalogs, so this is truly revolutionary. We already knew where they were located and how they are moving. Now we also know what many of these bodies are made of,” Seabroke said.
About 50 scientific papers based on the Gaia data will be published on Monday; some will appear in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a research mission,” said Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.
“This means that, while scanning the entire sky with billions of stars over and over again, Gaia is on the verge of making discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss,” Prusti said.
“This is one of its strengths, and we can’t wait for the astronomy community to delve into our new data to discover even more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we could have imagined.”
*With information from CNN’s Ashley Strickland
Source: CNN Brasil
