Musical Stars

I am happy to find out people actually notice it when I don’t post any new items for some time. Mark sent me a friendly reminder and he also suggested I’d mention these ‘Musical Stars’. No, I am not talking about the singing-and-acting type. There actually exists something called asteroseismology, the study of star sounds.

Stars oscillate on a - very - low frequency, which has to be pitched up many times to be heard by us humans. Scientists use the Kepler Space Telescope to measure these oscillations, and by the frequency they can tell the size of the stars. They combine this with the study of planets in the zone around the star where the temperature allows water to be liquid. Will this eventually lead us to the discovery of extraterrestrial life?