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Writer's pictureSTEM Today
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“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star: The Music of The Stars”

August 2023

By: Stacy Lagman


Many of us are familiar with the nursery rhyme that mentions that stars twinkle in the night sky, and that is actually not far from the facts. Stars actually do seem to twinkle thanks to our atmosphere. When rays of light from the star reach our planet, they are affected by the winds of our atmosphere and temperatures of different areas. The light from the star appears to twinkle because of the aforementioned factors, which can be seen from the ground.


But a new study suggests that stars do have a natural twinkle to them that extends far beyond our planet. Researchers at Northwestern University developed a computer model mimicking the star’s structure and movements since this phenomenon is actually impossible to be seen from our current Earth-bound telescopes. The study says that this ‘twinkle’ is caused by flowing waves of gas launched onto its surface, which is similar to the way our oceans work. When these waves arrive at the star’s surface, they produce a ‘twinkling’ effect only astronomers may be able to observe.


The team also experimented with the sounds of these stars. To do this, they passed the songs "Jupiter" (a movement from "The Planets" orchestral suite by composer Gustav Holst) and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" through three sizes of different stars (large, medium, and small). This created a distant and eerie effect that sounds like it came straight out of a fantasy movie. "The stars change the music and, correspondingly, change how the waves would look if we saw them as twinkling on the star's surface,” according to Evan Anders, the leader of the study.


References

 

Northwestern University, 2023, July 27, “Listen to a star ‘twinkle’”, ScienceDaily, accessed on 2023, August 3, [ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230727144014.htm ]


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