Here on our planet, earthquakes are a fairly common experience for many. It appears that similar “quakes” also rock other parts of the universe – and they can help us learn about the fabric of space.
“The study of ‘starquakes’ (like earthquakes, but in stars) promises to give us important new insights into the properties of neutron stars,” said a Wednesday press release from the University of Bath in the U.K. Researchers there recently led a study on this very subject, published last week in the Physical Review C journal.
Sometimes, starquakes can even impact Earth. According to the National Science Foundation, a starquake on the crust of a neutron star caused an X-ray wave to roll past Earth in late 2005, briefly disrupting our upper atmosphere. These quakes are caused by gravity twisting the crust of neutron stars until they break as their spinning speed slows, the foundation said.
Neutron stars are the collapsed remnants of massive stars, the university explained. After these stars burn out their fuel, they collapse under the force of their own gravity to become some of the densest matter in the universe.
“These extreme conditions mean that the properties of matter inside them may provide key information about the fundamental nature of matter that cannot be obtained by studying matter in Earth-bound experiments,” the press release said. However, the stars are quite far away from us and it is difficult to thoroughly test scientific theories about them.
That’s where asteroseismology comes in handy. It’s the study of vibrations and flares, and it is the focus of the recent research carried out by an international team of physicists that includes Dr. David Tsang and Dr. Duncan Neill from the Department of Physics at Bath and U.S. colleagues from Texas A&M and the University of Ohio.
From Earth, the team proposes measuring the “starquakes” using powerful telescopes. Neill explained that the techniques would require instruments already in operation, thus giving new applications to existing telescopes.
“We propose that, in the near future, asteroseismology could be used to obtain granular detail about matter inside neutron stars, and thus test theories like Chiral Effective Field Theory,” said Tsang. Los Alamos National Laboratory describes that as a “theory for the strong interactions among nucleons.”
All of this would help improve “our understanding of the universe and [advance] the way we live on our planet,” the University of Bath said. Findings from the study could benefit health, security and energy research, it added. In particular, the research could help reach a key objective of nuclear scientists to understand the properties and behavior of nuclear matter.
“As this work develops, we may find that we are able to use asteroseismology to pinpoint properties of matter at various densities within neutron stars, allowing astronomy to lead the way in guiding the development of new nuclear physics techniques,” said Neill. “We hope to expand our research in asteroseismology at Bath, seeing just how much it could tell us.”
He also hopes the research can help bring the fields of astronomy and nuclear physics closer together.