Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Asteroseismology
Summary
Asteroseismology is the study of oscillations in stars. Stars have many resonant modes and frequencies, and the path of sound waves passing through a star depends on the speed of sound, which in turn depends on local temperature and chemical composition. Because the resulting oscillation modes are sensitive to different parts of the star, they inform astronomers about the internal structure of the star, which is otherwise not directly possible from overall properties like brightness and surface temperature.
Asteroseismology is closely related to helioseismology, the study of stellar pulsation specifically in the Sun. Though both are based on the same underlying physics, more and qualitatively different information is available for the Sun because its surface can be resolved.
By linearly perturbing the equations defining the mechanical equilibrium of a star (i.e. mass conservation and hydrostatic equilibrium) and assuming that the perturbations are adiabatic, one can derive a system of four differential equations whose solutions give the frequency and structure of a star's modes of oscillation. The stellar structure is usually assumed to be spherically symmetric, so the horizontal (i.e. non-radial) component of the oscillations is described by spherical harmonics, indexed by an angular degree and azimuthal order . In non-rotating stars, modes with the same angular degree must all have the same frequency because there is no preferred axis. The angular degree indicates the number of nodal lines on the stellar surface, so for large values of , the opposing sectors roughly cancel out, making it difficult to detect light variations. As a consequence, modes can only be detected up to an angular degree of about 3 in intensity and about 4 if observed in radial velocity.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.