KASOC Data Release
Kepler-10: Music of the stars
Figure 1: Artist impression of Kepler-10 with the planet Kepler-10b transitting the star. From kepler.nasa.gov.
Imaging that you were a superhero capable of withstanding temperatures of thousands of degrees and had super-hearing allowing you to hear sounds much deeper than the human ear can normally detect. If you then took a swim in the hot plasma that the star Kepler-10 consists of, this is what you would hear.
Figure 2: Frequency-power spectrum of Kepler-10 showing the equidistant peaks indicating the stellar oscillations. From Batalha et.al. (2011).
In the beginning you will hear the sound of the star based upon the measurements from the Kepler space telescope, speeded up by a factor of 250.000 to make it audible to a normal human ear. Within the roaring noise of the stellar matter, the whole star oscillates in a set of unique tones. The oscillations of the star, or starquakes, are then slowly amplified to stand out from the noise of the rest the star. By studying the unique signatures hidden in the tones of the starquakes scientists are able to infer the detailed structure of the inside of Kepler-10.
Created by
Rasmus Handberg, rasmush@phys.au.dk
Danish AsteroSeismology Center
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University
Denmark