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The unusual starquakes are among multiple new discoveries made by Gaia, a mission launched in 2013 to create the “most accurate and complete multi-dimensional map of the Milky Way.” On Monday, ESA released its third batch of data from the spacecraft, revealing fresh details on nearly 2 billion stars in our galaxy.
“Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings. Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars,” said Conny Aerts, a professor at the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven in Belgium and a member of the Gaia collaboration, a group of 400 researchers that work on the data from the project, in an ESA news release.
The agency described the stellar vibrations spotted by Gaia as “large-scale tsunamis” that changed the shape of stars. Gaia wasn’t originally designed to detect the phenomenon but was able to discern strong movement on the surface of thousands of stars, including some where starquakes had seldom been seen before….
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