Cosmic Queries – Starquakes with Conny Aerts

Summary

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StarTalk Radio: Cosmic Queries – Starquakes with Conny Aerts

Date: May 8, 2026
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Co-host: Matt Kirshen
Guest: Prof. Conny Aerts (Astroseismology, KU Leuven & Radboud University)

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Episode Overview

This engaging episode of StarTalk’s "Cosmic Queries" dives into the fascinating field of astroseismology—specifically, “starquakes.” Host Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Matt Kirshen are joined by Professor Conny Aerts, one of the world’s leading experts on the vibrations and “quakes” that ripple within stars across the universe. Through audience questions, the trio explores what starquakes are, why they matter, how they're detected, and what they reveal about the lives and inner secrets of stars. The conversation also covers the differences and similarities between planetary and stellar quakes, the technology used in their detection, real-life stellar mysteries (like Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming”), and how the subtle music of the spheres can unlock cosmic evolution. The mood is lively, witty, and deeply curious, making complex astrophysics accessible—and fun.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

What is Astroseismology? (04:12 – 06:48)

• Conny Aerts explains: Astroseismology is “the study of the seismology of stars.”
• Unlike solid planets (with quakes arising from rigid crust shifts), stars are gaseous spheres and always moving. Starquakes are ongoing pressure and sound waves within stars, akin to vibrations in a concert hall.
• Quote: “Stars are three-dimensional musical halls—concert halls.” — Conny Aerts [06:48]
• These quakes let astronomers ‘see’ inside stars, much like geologists use earthquakes to probe Earth’s interior.

How Are Starquakes Detected? (06:48 – 09:17)

• Quakes in stars change their surface temperature and brightness in detectable patterns.
• Scientists observe tiny, periodic brightness variations—starquakes show up as subtle changes in light curves.
• “Each star has its own symphony…we [can] shift that global symphony into the audible range of humans. That’s called sonification.” — Conny Aerts [11:01]
• This enables, for instance, blind people to “hear the stars.”

The Music of the Spheres (09:17 – 11:07)

• Starquakes can be converted into sounds by shifting their natural frequencies into the audible range.
• Neil: “We have finally achieved the goals of the ancients by celebrating the music of the spheres.” [11:01]
• Conny: “Exactly. That’s true.” [11:07]
• This sonification is also important for accessibility and inclusion in astronomy.

Planetary vs. Stellar Quakes (12:13 – 15:51)

• Every object in nature “quakes”—planets (solid or gaseous), moons, even ice giants.
• The frequency and nature of these quakes depend on properties, especially density.
• For stars, brightness measurements from space-based telescopes (like Kepler/TESS) are used to study quakes, since we can’t physically place seismographs “there.”

What Can We Learn from Starquakes? (25:41 – 32:18)

• Unique insight: Starquakes reveal internal properties, especially stellar core rotation.
• “Thanks to the frequency shifts of these waves, we can now measure how stars rotate around. And what we have come to realize is that the theory of how stars evolve … is quite off.” — Conny Aerts [26:26]
• Internal rotation affects stellar mixing, longevity, and evolution in ways previously underestimated.
• “Stars have many more surprises than us astrophysicists have imagination.” — Conny Aerts [27:57]
• With about 2,000 stars measured, results show massive stars live somewhat longer than previously thought due to extra internal mixing.

Starquakes, Fusion, and Energy (32:30 – 34:55)

• Quakes can be caused by nuclear fusion turbulence, tidal effects from companions, or internal processes like convection.
• Starquakes themselves do not directly cause a star to explode or “lose mass” catastrophically, but they can impact mixing and evolution.

The Betelgeuse Dimming Mystery (36:24 – 40:40)

• The red supergiant star Betelgeuse dimmed dramatically in 2019/2020, spurring global curiosity.
• Conny explains: The dimming resulted from expelled stellar material temporarily blocking its light—common late in life for supergiant stars.
• “Astrophysicists have to be very patient, because the timescales for stars to do this stuff … are like hundreds of thousands of years.” — Conny Aerts [40:33]
• Despite speculation, Betelgeuse isn’t expected to go supernova imminently.

Observing Starquakes: Tools & Timescales (44:00 – 49:56)

• Space telescopes like Kepler and TESS are ideal for astroseismology due to their uninterrupted, long-duration observations.
• Resolution depends on length of observation: longer baseline = better frequency precision.
• Upcoming ESA’s PLATO mission will combine long-term and wide-sky coverage, with 24 telescopes in one instrument platform.
• “Astroseismologists are very patient people.” — Conny Aerts [47:08]

Starquakes and Solar Activity: Hazards to Earth? (50:02 – 53:09)

• Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and sunspots can disrupt stellar oscillations, but not in a way dangerous to Earth.
• The Earth’s magnetic field largely protects us from high-energy particles; periodic solar oscillations (starquakes) are largely unaffected by transient flare events.

The Big Picture: Are All Stars Variable? (54:04 – 55:38)

• Every star oscillates—some more than others.
• Even “non-variable” stars, with sensitive enough instruments, can be shown to have subtle, continuous quakes.
• “[We're] measuring the action up to parts per million.” — Conny Aerts [55:36]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Stars are three-dimensional concert halls. And the nice thing is, starquakes are always there.”
— Conny Aerts [06:48]

“We finally achieved the goals of the ancients by celebrating the music of the spheres.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson [11:01]

“Stars have many more surprises than us astrophysicists have imagination.”
— Conny Aerts [27:57]

“Thanks to the frequency shifts of these waves, we can now measure how stars rotate around. And … the theory … is quite off.”
— Conny Aerts [26:26]

“If you were in the center of a star, you’d be dense too.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson jokes to Matt [32:18]

“I nearly freaked out ... my whole life Betelgeuse was a certain brightness ... I cannot communicate my loss of breath.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson on Betelgeuse [36:24]

“Astroseismologists are very patient people.”
— Conny Aerts [47:08]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 04:12 – 06:48: What is astroseismology?
• 06:48 – 09:17: How are starquakes detected?
• 09:17 – 11:07: The music of the spheres; sonification for outreach/inclusion
• 12:27 – 15:51: Quakes on planets, moons, and differences between materials
• 25:41 – 32:18: What can starquakes reveal? Rotation, mixing, “stellar surprises”
• 36:24 – 40:40: The Betelgeuse dimming mystery
• 44:00 – 49:56: The role of Kepler, TESS, and PLATO in studying stellar oscillations
• 50:02 – 53:09: Starquakes, solar activity, and potential threats to Earth
• 54:04 – 55:38: All stars are variable; degrees of measurability

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Episode Tone & Final Thoughts

The episode is playful, accessible, and packed with deep astrophysics—balancing humor (“How do you hide from a starquake?”), curiosity, and technical rigor. Conny Aerts brings clarity and passion to the cutting-edge study of starquakes, illuminating how stellar “music” has fundamentally revised our understanding of star life cycles, core physics, and cosmic history. For those new to astrophysics, it’s a rich crash-course in how starlight—and the faintest cosmic tremors—can resonate with human curiosity across light-years.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want the insights and spirit of the episode—without the ads or filler.

Transcript

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, start talking Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. This one is titled Starquakes. I've got as a co host here Matt Kirschen. Matt, welcome back to StarTalk.

[Matt Kirschen]

Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be back.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So you solicited questions about like stars and starquakes from.

[Matt Kirschen]

I'm very excited about this topic and so are the listeners. There's been a Lot of. A lot of your Patreon patrons have resp. To this one. And we're gonna try and get through as many of these as possible, but.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, I don't know a damn thing about. I don't know a damn thing about starquakes, so.

[Matt Kirschen]

Yeah, I know. I live in California where earthquakes are a problem, so I know how to deal with those, but I don't if you're involved in a starquake, do you. Is getting under a table still enough, or how do we deal with.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we're gonna find out for sure. So our guest with the expertise we need is Connie Aerts. I think I pronounced that right. Connie, welcome to StarTalk.

[Connie Aerts]

Hi. Glad to be here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excellent. Now, you're in from Belgium and the Netherlands. You have a dual appointment, one as the professor of astrophysics at. Let me get this straight. In Leuven, Belgium, and it's ku. It's like Catholic University in Leuven. Is that correct?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, KU Leuven. Just don't worry about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

KU Leuven.

[Connie Aerts]

Leuven is a small college town in Belgium. So that's my farm.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excellent. And in the Netherlands, you're a professor of astroseismology at Radboud University in the Netherlands. And so the fact that that's even a title to hold, astroseismology says how far we've come in just the. The specification within the broader field of astrophysics. And I think this is just delightful. And your expertise is stellar astrophysics, stellar structure and evolution. These are two favorites of mine professionally. But I never really thought about seismology in anything other than Earth. And so what. First, tell us, what is astroseismology?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, it's the study of the seismology of stars. Now, as you say, you have to

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

do better than that.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, I know, I know. Give me a chance. Right?

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Give me a chance.

[Connie Aerts]

So we all know earthquakes, that the Earth has a whole crust. You know, it's not pleasant to have earthquakes, but it's fantastic to have starquakes. Stars are hot, gaseous spheres, and they also move up and down. And we can use these starquakes to learn what's inside the star. It's the only way to know how to look inside a star. And that's just like seismologists of the Earth. You know, they are the only happy people when the Earth is quaking, let's say. Why? Because the earthquakes create waves. They travel into the planet, they bounce back at the iron core, and seismographs detect it. And then we can do all sorts of fun physics and chemistry. Of our planet. And we do the same, but then for stars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Matt, I think Connie just said that while cities are burning and everyone is dying, geologists are delighted that they have earthquakes.

[Matt Kirschen]

Absolutely. Yeah. I'm hiding under a table while my pets are going crazy. And seismologists like the data. What beautiful data we're getting right now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The data. So what I'm confused, though, because when I think of an earthquake, I have a very simple understanding of it, that you have a rigid crust that is under pressure and under tension, and then it spontaneously gives way and then you get an abrupt shift and that's an earthquake. But when I think of stars, they are fluids, they're gaseous fluids. So what could possibly be quaking if you don't have anything solid to build up the tension that then gets released?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. So that's a bit different because the starquakes are happening all the time because it's a gas. And so you have motions, Right. Up and down motions, but also more complex motions. And if you press a gas and then release it, it creates sound waves. That's a bit like music in a theater hall. So for me, stars are three dimensional. Musical halls. Concert halls. Right. Wow. And so the nice thing is that starquakes are always there. Luckily for us humans, the earthquakes die out quickly. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they're rare relative. I mean, they're rare in the sense of the ones that do serious damage are rare. But as I understand it, there are actually earthquakes of even very small magnitude almost all the time. I think that's correct.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, that's correct. Because anybody in nature vibrates. Yeah. And so, yeah, stars do that all the time, and they do it permanently. Which for us astrophysicists is great because we can measure the up and down motion. Why? Because it gives changes in the temperature of the star, and so the brightness of the star changes as a function of time. And then we have our seismographs that measure these changes as a function of time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And your seismographs are also, you implied there that they're sensitive to those boundaries where temperature changes.

[Connie Aerts]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because your sound would get reflected or your pressure wave, which we're calling sound, would get reflected or bent in a different way. And you use that to model the total interior structure of the star. Is that correct?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, that's correct. But, yeah, like, we cannot hear these sound waves with our ears. So we see the brightness variations because the sound is only propagating there where there is gas. And between us and the star, you know, there's nothing. It's empty. Right. So we can't literally hear the frequencies of the waves, but we see the up and down motion. And so that is actually connected. The frequency of these sound waves created by these up and down motions is connected to the physics and also the chemical composition of the star in its interior. So we can't literally dive into the stellar concert hall, but we can measure the frequencies from a distance, let's say.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But if you could, you would hear all of these.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. That's fantastic. Sometimes I give lectures for musical artists, and then they are all totally fascinated about these sounds.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like, you know, let me test this on Matt. So, Matt, NASA is going to plan a mission to send astronauts to the sun to listen to these sounds. But it's dangerous, obviously. So they're gonna go at night.

[Matt Kirschen]

Right. You'd need your earplugs as well. I. You know, I take a loud concert sometimes. I don't take any chances. Now I'm getting older, my hearing's going that. By the way. I know, I know. We haven't got into the questions yet, but that actually is one of our questions from Lucas, from listener Lucas was actually about whether you can make that the heartbeat of stars into music.

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[Matt Kirschen]

So you're saying. Yes, that you can absolutely do this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my goodness. So have people done. So you have a portfolio of frequencies going on at different times in different locations. And so you get a clever musician to sort of take all of that bass material and figure out a way to listen to it. That'd be interesting.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah. So we actually just shift. I mean, each star has its own symphony, Right. Depending on how big it is, how much mass it has, how old it is, it adds its own symphony. But then we shift that global symphony into the audible range of humans. That's called sonification. It's a whole field by itself. And actually, it allows blind people to be astronomers. I find that I'm a very. For me, inclusion is very important. So in this way, we can reach people who can't see, but they can hear the stars. But we have to help them a little bit. By shifting the audible range, we have

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

finally achieved the goals of the ancients by celebrating the music of the spheres.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, exactly. That's true. Oh, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so that. So that question already got asked, Matt. So that was. Who asked that?

[Matt Kirschen]

That was. That was Lucas from New west who asked that question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And what is newest? What is that?

[Matt Kirschen]

I don't know. It just says New West. I'm not sure exactly. But Lucas also proceeds it by saying, I have a geek kind of question, which I don't think you need to proceed. Any questions to start off with that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is a geek safe space here, everybody. You don't have to preface it, but New West. I mean, I live in New York and you know, there's formerly New Amsterdam, just south of New England. I never heard of New West. I don't know what that is. Maybe that's California after it breaks away from the San Andreas fault.

[Matt Kirschen]

Just floating off, just floating off into the Pacific.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So why don't we get some more questions here? This is great. Now that we have some foundation for.

[Matt Kirschen]

Yeah, we've got some awesome ones. Some of them have already. Some of them you've already kind of answered. And I'm sure that'll happen as we go along, but I'll try and get as many ones in. So James Smith from Indianapolis says, what is the largest recorded quake not found here on Earth? And also, do all planets have plates that shift like Earth? A couple of people have asked that question as well. Whether.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All interesting. So let's start there first. You know, we know Earth is geologically active because there's like volcanoes and plate tectonics. So where else in the solar system might do that before we get back to the sun?

[Connie Aerts]

Oh, well, you know, all planets will have quakes. I mean, any, anybody in nature quakes. I, I was banging, I was about to bang the table here, but I will not do that. But the table would also have, you know, quakes. So they dump out quickly depending on whether you have a gaseous planet or a crust like planet like Earth. So Jupiter, Saturn, all the big gaseous planets in our solar system, they also have quakes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait a minute, Connie, you're saying every sound anywhere is a quake to you?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. Okay, that's true.

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[Matt Kirschen]

So a guitar is. What we're doing right now is kind of causing the tiniest of tiniest quakes

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

by we're quaking Earth's atmosphere.

[Connie Aerts]

Of course, you're creating sound waves.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh my God.

[Matt Kirschen]

Listener Woody also asked, by the way, on this same topic, what, what different would the ice giants experience quakes? I guess you've said the answer is yes. And what possible differences would there be between Earth, water ice, frozen methane and nitrogen quakes?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. So the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, that's a. Wait, just a quick thing. So we've got ice in Uranus, Neptune, the ice giants, and we've got sort of gases in Jupiter, Saturn. We've got Earth's crust here. And so presumably you've Connie, you've got some portfolio of who makes what kind of sound under what conditions so that you can decode what you hear. Is that correct?

[Connie Aerts]

That's correct. And so the frequency of the sound waves of all these heavenly bodies is really determined by the density of the object. Right. And so stars are gases and their density is very different from the density here on Earth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're very low. Yeah.

[Connie Aerts]

Or in Jupiter. Yeah. So by measuring the frequencies of the quakes, we know quite directly how big the object is and what its density is. And if you know these two, then you know the mass.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So but Connie, you said that, you said, you said that on the sun you, you measure the quakes because some parts of the sun get brighter relative to others because they're hotter. How do you do that with just a planet sitting out there in space?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, we need to send some space mission there to come closer and to be able to see this. And so for stars, we also, I mean, this is a booming research field in astrophysics. Why? Because we recently had the luck of being able to measure the brightness variations with satellites. Yeah, we don't have a seismograph that we can put there literally like for the Earth, but we sent instruments that measure these tiny variations in the gas. You know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so I'm an old world astrophysicist. So when you say we make these measurements by going there. That's cheating.

[Connie Aerts]

That's cheating. Yeah. Yeah. We can't go there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's tabletop science at that level, if you get to go there. But you're saying it's the same kind of features in a gaseous planet. Some parts will be a little warmer or cooler than others on this surface. And that'll tell you, that'll give you seismic information about what's going on inside.

[Connie Aerts]

As soon as the density changes, for whatever reason, density changes give pressure waves. And these are sound waves. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Matt Kirschen]

And so the follow up part from James, what's the largest recorded quake not found on Earth?

[Connie Aerts]

Oh, we have the slowest quake in a star. Like it can take several, several months in period. Well, for the sun, it's five minutes, by the way. For those who don't know. Yeah. The solar quakes go up and down, create sound wave with periods of about a few minutes, five minutes at their strongest. So for a very big blue supergiant star, it takes months before the quake went up and down.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So just to be clear, the normal frequencies we listen to are hundreds and thousands of cycles per second. And that's what our eardrum and brain will record. And you're saying these are cycles every five minutes?

[Connie Aerts]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that's fast or even every month. So that's why you have to shift back to our audio range.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Otherwise we would never even know it was happening.

[Connie Aerts]

That's right. These are slow waves to human standards.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. You'd vaporize first, but while you were vaporized, you would not know you were in the middle of a starquake.

[Connie Aerts]

That's right.

[Matt Kirschen]

That's wild for me. So incredibly slow, but presumably hugely energetic.

[Connie Aerts]

Yes, that's. That could. That's true. Yeah. So the energy of each wave can be quite tremendous, but that also depends on the type of waves that you're dealing with.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, wow. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And we're to come back to more starquakes was like, what? But to Connie, everything's a quake. So we'll get more into that in this episode of Startalk Cosmic Queries when we return. Do we have any good reason to think that aliens would be evil? Where did we get that idea from? Aliens could be the most peace loving creatures the universe has ever generated, yet our representations of them tend to be diabolical. Which gets me to wonder that these representations of evil aliens are not based on how we think they will behave. That maybe they're really based on how we know we have behaved to one another. Especially when there's a conflict between a higher technology and a lower technology. So exploring the topic of aliens can not only give us insights into all the ways of being alive and the universe, it can, on occasion, hold up a mirror to our greatest fear, which might in fact, be ourselves. That and more in my latest offering. Take me to your perspectives on your first alien encounter. I narrated the audiobook that's available with the print version, and I'm kind of thinking you should get it now. It'd be too late. If you have your first alien encounter and have not yet read the book, you want to be ready.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We're talking about star quakes and my co host Matt G. Kirschen. Matt, where can I find you on the Internet?

[Matt Kirschen]

Well, you can find my podcast Probably Science. I start with the Neil episode. That's always a nice place to start.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was a guest once on your Probably Science. I just thought by now it would have been called Certainly Science. I just I thought it was evolutionary, but certainly not.

[Matt Kirschen]

The longer we do the show, the more probably it gets. It's going to descend through possibly to science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're probably not.

[Matt Kirschen]

And then I'm on Twitter Matkirshan and technically on Instagram, but I'm very rarely there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Kirschen K A R S H E N and we have as our in house expert right now on Starquakes professor of astroseismology in the Netherlands. But right now, Connie Aerts, I think I pronounced that right, is visiting New York City at a place called the Flatiron Institute, which is in the Flatiron section of Manhattan. And very cool science is happening there. All manner of science. It started with sort of math and astrophysics, but it's spilling into biology and computer science, where very deep problems that need high performance computing and clever people to solve them are invited to then gather their talents and try to solve the secrets of the Universe. And Connie Arts is on sabbatical this year. So Connie, we're delighted to have you as part of this podcast.

[Connie Aerts]

Very grateful to be here. Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. So we've got some more questions, but before we do that, I just want to be clear that most people's understanding of the word quake is I think, built in, is that it's abrupt and short lived. That's kind of built into our life experience with a quake. But we now hearing about quakes on completely different timescales. Should you have invented another word to describe a quake that moves on the scale of days or months rather than seconds or minutes?

[Connie Aerts]

Sure. And I use the term star quakes for popular lectures, but actually in our professional life we speak of stellar oscillations. So the global oscillations, they're smooth, they're properly behaved. So for stars it's a bit less abrupt than for earthquakes, let's say.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Okay. So if on Earth they were Earth oscillations, then Matt, maybe you wouldn't have to hide under a desk or in the structural beams of the house.

[Matt Kirschen]

I would just ride it out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just ride it out. Surf it out.

[Matt Kirschen]

Keep the knees complexed, keep your core stable. That's. That's all you need.

[Connie Aerts]

But you would get seasick all the time, you know, because they would always be there, you know? Yeah.

[Matt Kirschen]

Lies on the horizon. That's the secret. Always look out the window. Don't try.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Didn't know that.

[Matt Kirschen]

What's inside.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Take me surfing one day out in Los Angeles and teach me.

[Matt Kirschen]

Oh, I'm a terrible surfer, but okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So Matt, what do we else do we have for Connie?

[Matt Kirschen]

We've got some great questions by the way. Just side note, I love when we have topics like this, when it's something that is close to Neil's wheelhouse but just outside it. When it's. When it's like in your field of astrophysics but something that you've never really encountered. They're my favorite episodes because.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because you like looking how much of an idiot I am. That's what you're saying.

[Matt Kirschen]

I love it when you. Yeah, just. Just at the edge of Neil's knowledge. It's my favorite. It's. It's the best.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, those are my favorite episodes where I learned stuff, so.

[Matt Kirschen]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is good.

[Matt Kirschen]

So I'm going to combine these two questions. I like to do this because.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because I want to hear their names anyway.

[Matt Kirschen]

Absolutely. Dylan and from NAU in Flagstaff and Alejandro Reynoso from Monterrey have both asked about what we can actually learn from the oscillation of stars. Dylan says, can we predict its age and. Or understand the core? And also do all stars oscillate or just dying stars, supermassive stars, main sequence stars? And then Alejandro says, what have you learned from analyzing starquakes that you couldn't learn with other methods? So basically they're both asking, what specifically is it that we can learn from these quakes?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And yeah, yeah, I'm going to tighten that question and say, what are you learning that we didn't otherwise figure out through other means?

[Connie Aerts]

Okay. If there's one word that I have to ask to that question, it is rotation of stars. That's more than one word. But internal rotation of stars. And why is that? Let me give the analogy with music again. So we have sound waves that or happening inside a star, but the gas in the star is rotating around. Right. And what do you get when you put a musician in a theater play and you make the podium rotate just for the fun of it, as a surprise to the musician?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You get pissed off. Musicians. That's what you get.

[Connie Aerts]

Exactly. I like that experiment, actually. You can really do that. But the symphony is destroyed. That's what the audience would say. Now, for me, as an astro seismologist, the frequencies of the waves get shifted. Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Doppler shift.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, they get shifted because of the extra motion due to the rotation. And we can measure that. And we're not measuring that at the surface of the star, but inside the star, where the star quake has its strongest energy. Right. And so what we have come to realize is that the theory of how stars evolve, relying on how they rotate in their interior is quite off. It's not very good. And that's not surprising. Right, because we could only measure before we had starquakes, we could only measure the rotation of the star at its external layer. Like for the sun, you see the tiny little dark spots of the sun rotating around. If you're patient, every 26 days you see them back in your line of sight. So the sun rotates with a period of about 26 days. But that's just the outer layers. It doesn't say at all how it rotates in its interior. So if you have no information, what can you do? Well, you think, well, it won't be that different.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You just assume it's the same. Right?

[Connie Aerts]

You assume it's the same.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Everything else rotates as a kind of a unified object. Why would I even think some lower level would rotate at a different rate?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, the stars have many more Surprises than us astrophysicists have imagination. So what?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What a smack.

[Connie Aerts]

Oh, Matt, did you hear.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Matt, Matt, did I just hear this woman correctly here?

[Matt Kirschen]

Yeah, I stand by it. I'm on Team Star on this one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that was a smackdown right there. Okay.

[Connie Aerts]

I always say the stars are right. The theory is wrong if it doesn't match with each other. Right. So thanks to the frequency shifts of these waves, we can now measure how stars rotate around. And why is that important? Well, if they rotate faster or slower, then their material gets mixed in a different way. Yeah, that's also something you can imagine if you take the analogy with coffee drinkers. You know, if you like coffee with milk, you pour milk into your coffee and you don't wait until, you know, until everything is mixed because then the coffee is cold and it doesn't taste well anymore. No, you take a spoon and you rotate your coffee. In my terminology, that is saying you bring angular momentum to the coffee cup. And what, why do you do that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what everyone says when they're having coffee. Starbucks.

[Connie Aerts]

That's what everybody does without saying it. And that's because everybody prefers well mixed coffee with milk.

[Matt Kirschen]

And so I'm assuming at the Flatiron Institute that just the coffee station there has angular momentum implements.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. How much angular momentum would you like on your coffee this morning?

[Matt Kirschen]

Yes. Do you want a metal angular momentum implement or one of the wooden straight ones?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, we could do an experiment of how people do that, but you know, the diversity of human beings taking their spoons will be large. And in stars there's a whole range of internal rotation frequencies that we have measured in. We have about 2,000 stars now for which this has been measured by many groups in the world with astro seismologies. And so the life of the stars is really going slower if I look at the measurements.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You mean our estimates for their life expectancy need to be updated to have them live longer than we originally thought, Is that what you're saying?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. Particularly for the big massive stars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is that because they're mixing more material into their core, giving them a little more lease on life, and they, they

[Connie Aerts]

get more material into their inner part. And in the inner part of the stars is actually a nuclear reactor for me because the there, the simplest constituent, which is hydrogen, is turned into helium by nuclear fusion. And stars are masterpieces in that. But if you bring more hydrogen into that area where it's hot and dense enough, then the star can live longer. And so the rotation affects how much nuclear fuel you bring inside its Interior.

[Matt Kirschen]

Actually, that was about to be the opposite of what I would have guessed, because I was wondering whether the sort of. The stirring effect would have sped up the fusion reaction by kind of, you know, you can increase the speed of a chemical reaction. I know that's different from a nuclear reaction by. By stirring the chemicals together or by increasing the energy in there. But you're saying it's the opposite because it's bringing more fuel in from the outside.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, that's right, yes. Once the nuclear burning is ongoing, the nuclear fusion in stars is stable. Stars are. Can do that very well. We humans can't do that here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now, everything I know about the nuclear furnace says that it's pretty small relative to the size of the star itself. Do your waves give you enough information about tiny areas like a. Like the nuclear core?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, well, tiny. It's 10% of the mass that they typically takes part in the nuclear fusion. So it's still 10%. So it's not of the mass.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Even if it's physically small. It's got. It's got a lot of mass going.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, because the density is very high. And so if you. If you change that 10% to, say, 12%, that sounds like, you know, it's only 2%, you know, but that's a lot of fuel that you bring into your nuclear reactor. And so then.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And increase the life by at least 20%, perhaps, or maybe.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It can really change the lifetime of the star. So that's. That's so to go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And, Matt, if you were in the center of a star, you'd be dense, too. I just wanted to tell you that.

[Matt Kirschen]

Thanks. It's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we got more questions. Matt, bring them on.

[Matt Kirschen]

We do. Aziz from Saudi Arabia says, I wonder if it's possible for a star to have a starquake so strong caused by, for example, nuclear fission or fusion happening abnormally fast or caused by any other reason to lose mass. I thought I'd ask that one because we're already talking about fusion, you know,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

in the formation of stars in the galaxy. You can get shockwaves across a gas cloud that's otherwise minding its own business, and it can trigger gravitational collapse and other interesting features. So I'd love that question, Connie. So are starquakes just the product of what's going on, or are they a participant in causing what's going on?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. So you can have all sorts of reasons why stars have these oscillations. Right. And they can indeed be caused by the. By the fierce turbulence in the core of a very massive star. Because it's, you know, it's. We call that convection, turbulent motions. And they create waves also because, again, they make the gas, you know, compress and expand. But there are also other reasons why stars can have starquaves. Think of the Earth moon system and tides. Well, half of the stars, or even more, if you go to higher masses, they live together with two. And then they have tidal binary star system.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just like in that scene in Star wars where Luke comes out, is at the sand planet, and he sees a double sunset. That's the only accurate science in the entire series.

[Connie Aerts]

That's okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's okay.

[Connie Aerts]

You know. Yeah. But actually.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so what happens there? So you have a. You have a gravitational tidal dance, and.

[Connie Aerts]

That's right. They rotate around each other and they pull. They give a tidal pull. Right. And so you could also say that for me, tidal forces are actually forced oscillation. You know, I say everybody oscillates in nature. So when the stars are close enough together, the tidal oscillations, as I call them, are very strong. Can be very strong. So that's another reason why stars can have stars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So these are like a tidal bulge in the direction of the object responsible for it. Yeah, See, in my older years, I have a title bulge as well in my section. I'm watching for that just to see what I can do about it.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah, you want to prevent it, but we are getting silhouette started.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Matt, give me some more.

[Matt Kirschen]

Quentin from Switzerland says, and I don't know what Quentin's referring to, so hopefully one of you two can fill me in. Says, do you need more data to exactly figure out what happened with Betelgeuse recently?

[Connie Aerts]

Is it pronounced Betelgeuse?

[Matt Kirschen]

Betelgeuse.

[Connie Aerts]

Betelgeuse.

[Matt Kirschen]

Yes, it is pronounced Betelgeuse, like the film, but spelled differently. It seems pretty unlikely that we will witness a similar event in the near future. So what is it? What did happen?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I gotta lead off with this, and then we'll get the actual answer from Connie. Okay, I heard Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It's an important star in one of the most dominant constellations of all 88. Dominant in size and appearance is Orion. Orion is visible in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Cause it straddles the equator on the sky. And so there's this star, Betelgeuse, one of the biggest, baddest red giants in the known universe. And someone told me, do you realize Betelgeuse is getting dimmer? I said, no, what? What? And I looked up and I went. Because my whole life Betelgeuse was a certain brightness relative to other stars in the constellation. I cannot communicate to you my loss of breath in the moment I looked up and I say, what is happening? Is this, you know, is this. Is the seventh seal broken? Is there some. Is this something biblical? So, Connie, I want you to know. Yeah, I nearly freaked out. So what happened to Betelgeuse a year ago when it just got mysteriously dim, like it went to less than half its normal brightness. And that had never been observed ever in any time anybody's been looking at the star. So we're gonna blame you for this. What happened?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, Betelgeuse is behaving normally at the star. It's a supergiant, right? It's a very big star. And so these stars are nearing the end of their life, and so they're puffing up their material and they're blowing it away, so to speak. Right. And so when material gets lost from the star, well, then for us, the star is obscured because it's in between the supergiant and us. There's material that is being expelled. Now, for me, as an astro seismologist, that's a bit annoying, that behavior, because Betelgeuse has starquakes, but all that material that's being expelled makes it hard to still measure them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's blocking your view.

[Connie Aerts]

It's blocking the view. And that's also the reason why, for us, it's difficult to do astro seismology from ground based telescopes. You know, the stars are up there. People say they twinkle, right? But that twinkling that you see with your eyes, that's not the star. That's actually the starlight that is being perturbed by the Earth atmosphere. Right? And so it's a bit similar, but then the twinkling of Betelgeuse is caused by the material it has expelled. But it does have also oscillations. And these oscillations can tell us how old it is and how big it is, etc.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, it's Betelgeuse ready to blow. Because we think that's a supernova category star. Is it? Yeah, that people. I, I said, oh my gosh, something bad's gonna happen.

[Connie Aerts]

It's gonna happen. It's gonna. It's not bad. No, it's not bad because it will explode eventually. But that can take still some while. So, you know, you don't wanna go and look, every day, because you may need to have some patience, like Connie.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're trained to think that if something blows up, it's bad.

[Matt Kirschen]

Okay, I'm sorry, but these guys are like, it's exciting. This is more data. This is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, it's more data. Okay. All right. This is like the rocket launchers who. The rocket blows up on the launch pad. You say, oh, are you upset by that failure? No, that was an experiment rich in data.

[Matt Kirschen]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So.

[Connie Aerts]

Well, but I'm saying it's good because it enriches the galaxy with metals, with carbon, with oxygen, with iron. And, you know, we need that as human beings. So.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, just. Just to be clear, Matt, astrophysicists are. We are very lazy with regard to the periodic table of elements. And so any element that's not hydrogen or helium, we call it a metal. But this freaks out chemists. We're self aware of this bad vernacular. But the point is, 98% of the universe is hydrogen and helium, and the rest is just other stuff. So we just experimental error, so we just call them metals. And I'm just covering Connie's ass right here when she said the metals, such as carbon. Right. No, she's being fully astrophysical in. In the referencing. But, Connie, you speak of this blockage of ejected gas like, of course it would do that, yet it hasn't done it in the thousands of years we've been observing the night sky and mapping its brightness relative to other stars. So do you have an account for why it's doing it now and it's not doing it regularly?

[Connie Aerts]

Oh, but you see, we astrophysicists have to be very patient because the timescales for stars to do this kind of stuff, you know, that's like hundreds of thousands of years, you know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you're saying if we see it only once in a few thousand years, that could be a regular interval.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right. She got out of that one, Matt.

[Connie Aerts]

I think it's just annoying that we human beings only live for like 100 years at most, if we are. Luck in an astronomical timescale, that's instantaneous. That's very short.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, we gotta take our last break. And when we come back, more astroseismology with a professor of astroseismology, Connie Aerts, on StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

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[Matt Kirschen]

This is Ken the Nerdneck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're back for the third and final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Astroseismology edition with our expert, a professor of astroseismology, Connie Aerts, and she's on sabbatical now at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, which has gathered all manner of computational scientists in multiple fields, where they not only compare notes with each other in their own field, but across disciplines. Perhaps there's some cross pollination that can lead to discoveries that wouldn't otherwise happen. And Connie, you are based in the Netherlands and in Belgium you have two different appointments that of course there's strong overlap in what they are. But this is very cool that we have you here, we're borrowing you from Europe and great to have you here in my hometown, New York City. So, Matt, we have a few minutes for a few more questions. Let's see how many more we can slip in. These questions are from our Patreon members still correct?

[Matt Kirschen]

They are, yeah. So Kevin the sommelier asks, does asteroseismology coincide with the data we can get from the James Webb Space Telescope? Are we able to see those quakes in infrared? And then.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I like that, yeah.

[Matt Kirschen]

And also then gives a wine recommendation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh yeah, because I told him I would not allow him to ask another question if he's going to bill himself as a sommelier. There's got to be a recommendation.

[Matt Kirschen]

So he recommends specifically for our, for our Belgian guest says with Moule frite, Kevin recommends a bottle of Muscadet Sur Lee Lagrange. So there we go. Thank you, Kevin, for that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. This is like a dessert wine. All right. Let the world know that's a recommendation. I love that question, Connie. I didn't even think to think about this because I love stellar evolution, but I'm primarily a galaxies guy and a large scale structure guy, which the James Webb telescope is exquisitely tuned to observe the early universe. And it would never occur to me to imagine if it could be of use to you in thinking about starquakes. So how has your field put your sort of hooks into the data of that telescope?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, the James Webb is fantastic, but I would not spend its time on starquakes. And so let me explain why. You know, James Webb can pierce very deep into the early universe in the infrared. What I need as a seismologist is really long term measurements. And that's why we love the Kepler mission of NASA and now the TESS mission and the future PLATO mission because they're staring at stars for years without interruption. And so you don't want to spend James Webb on that because it has, as you say, so much other fantastic extra galactic science to do. So I don't want to hook on James Webb. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Of course. At all times in our field, Matt, we're always judging whether you need one particular telescope for that task versus another telescope that might be either more available or less a cutting edge. Because you want the cutting edge telescope for the cutting edge science that's going to break open whole new fields typically. So yeah, that's a very important point that you're mentioning there, Connie, But I want to also ask, that's part of the great computational challenge because if you have a lot of quakes of all different frequencies, short measurements cannot distinguish one from the other. Correct. You need a very long baseline so that you can tease out of the data frequencies that are represented enough to know that they're real. Did I characterize that?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, that's, that's very well described. And in practice, you know, the, the precision of the frequency goes as 1 over the total time base of the measurements. Yeah. So if Kepler measures four years, well, that's one over four years in frequency resolution, as we call it, capacity to unravel these star quake frequencies. So we need, we need to be very astro. Seismologists are very patient people.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what you're saying is if you so I like that. So if you measure something for four years, you can't really say much about frequencies that occur on two year time scales. That's right. Because you'd have only had one or two cycles in there and that's not enough to even know if they're real.

[Connie Aerts]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you need enough cycles in your baseline of data to be able to say yeah, that's real. Yes, it's repeating and it's reliable.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, that's right. And so that's why we need these long time series and we can only do the work once we achieve that. So we need dedicated space missions to achieve that. And James Webb is just not one of them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I got it. Interesting.

[Connie Aerts]

Please leave James Webb to the people who need it. And I'm not one of them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, that's very magnanimous of you.

[Connie Aerts]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So. So just to update people. So Kepler was a telescope that looked in one part of the sky looking for earth like planets around sun, like stars, studying them for a long period of time. Tess, that's an acronym for what I forgot.

[Connie Aerts]

Transiting Exoplanets.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exoplanet Survey Satellites. Satellite. Thank you. So TESS will see the entire sky, but not quite to the depth in space that Kepler did. And so now what is PLATO going to do and is that also an acronym?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, well PLATO stands for Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars. And PLATO is actually going to from construction combines the best of both worlds of the Kepler mission and the TESS mission in the sense that we need long term observations, but we also need the whole open, not the whole sky, but a very, very big part of it. To have copies of the Earth in our line of sight that rotate around copies of the sun. It takes a year for us to evolve. And so PLATO has that built in. It's actually it's 24 telescopes on one big platform.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh my gosh. Okay, I didn't know that about it.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. Okay, so it's a multi telescope instrument that is being built by Europeans space agency right now. I tend to call it my third child because I've been.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, you're deep with involved in the design and objectives of it. Well congratulations for that.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah. So that's exciting. I want to see the data before I retire. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Kepler was a famous German mathematician who coincided with Galileo actually in time. And we all heard of Plato, but I don't know any tess. So TESS was an acronym but not an acronym of a famous scientist of the past.

[Connie Aerts]

Exactly, exactly.

[Matt Kirschen]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, they don't always work out the Way you.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, just as long as the machinery works for us. That's the trophy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You don't care what the hell you call it. All right, so Matt, keep it going. What do you have?

[Matt Kirschen]

I am gonna to try and get as many of these questions as possible. I am gonna try and.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's test Connie and see if she can do a lightning round.

[Connie Aerts]

Here we go.

[Matt Kirschen]

We're explaining four questions. They said it couldn't be done, but four different questioners between cause a lot of people have asked about the effect of sunspots on starquakes and how they affect Earth. So Charles Mako asks how they affect starquakes. Trevor Mills says, how close would a nearby star have to be for a starquake to be considered dangerous for Earth? And then Sarah Rosen says, how big of a CME would it take for the sun's gravity to be negatively affected? And Gina Martin says, why didn't the one, the starquake back in 2004 wipe us out? I've read that it released more energy than our own, some would admit in 150,000 years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so let me tighten all those up. So, Connie, clearly there are quakes going on all the time. And I presume that a cme, a coronal mass ejection, is itself detectable as some kind of quake activity, so. And of course, sunspots are measures of the activity of the sun, so. But you haven't mentioned solar flares or coronal mass ejections or sunspots yet. Not much in this conversation. So what role do they play in all of this?

[Connie Aerts]

Oh, well, the role they play is they disturb the periodic oscillations of the sun. But it's not bad for us. Why not? Because coronal mass ejection, or star spots that rotate around, you know, they do not give the same signal in the periodicity of the quakes. I'm quaking my microphone right now. So, you know, a coronal mass ejection is an abrupt event. It's more like earthquake, you could say. It happens and it disappears. Right. But it doesn't disturb us finding the five minute oscillations of the sun, which are always there. Yeah, they get disturbed abruptly, but then they continue and they continue and they continue all the time. So for us, you know, we can unravel the signal of star spots, of mass ejections, even for stars other than the sun, from the always smooth periodic oscillation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So how about the dangers that they might pose if you do have a coronal mass ejection that happens to Head towards us.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. So the Earth is protected by a magnetic field that protects us from all these high energetic particles falling in on our planet. And other stars are too far away. So, I mean, it's only a matter of the solar quakes. They are not dangerous for us. The coronal mass ejections, they disturb our electronics every once in a while. Right, but you know, that's not a periodic oscillation that I would call solar quakes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, yeah, I forgot that you enjoy events like that, even if they mess with our computers.

[Connie Aerts]

That's how we.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's how we forgot that. I learned that earlier in this podcast.

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that almost counts as a lightning round, Matt, because she answered three questions in one reply. So let's see if we can get a few more in before we call it a day.

[Matt Kirschen]

James Allen from Brisbane in Australia says, could a starquake large enough theoretically cause a star to tear apart and would descend a high radiation blast like a supernova?

[Connie Aerts]

What?

[Matt Kirschen]

Could we learn such things from our own star?

[Connie Aerts]

A star quake would not rip apart a star because it's really a smooth, nice periodic variability. You know, the biggest star quakes in terms of expansion and contraction, let's say, can make the star become bigger and smaller by about 10% in its radius, let's say, say, but not make it explode. That's another phenomenon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, again, that's people thinking that a quake is a spontaneous bad thing. And for you, they're all fantastic, smooth thing. Fantastic smooth thing.

[Matt Kirschen]

Well, on that same note, Connor Holm from Sequim, Washington, says, is it possible to predict where and when a star quake will occur, and if so, what's the largest predicted star quake and how much bigger is it compared to the largest record recorded one?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, stark wakes happen all the time. I keep repeating that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let me, let me ask it differently then. What variety of your oscillations carries the most energy?

[Connie Aerts]

Well, the, the, the simplest star quakes are radial oscillations, you know, up and down and up and down. So everything is expanding and contracting while keeping spherical symmetry. So that's about the, you know, the largest energetic it can get. And that's, for me, just a simple oscillation because it's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that's what gives us variable stars, I guess, right?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Cepheids or Lyrae.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it's half a star. I mean, some huge fraction of stars in the night sky are variable, presumably for this reason. And I heard when I was in graduate school, Connie, that if you looked at every star close enough, with sharp enough data. They're all variable.

[Connie Aerts]

Of course they are. Everything oscillates. Of course.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we just have to draw some arbitrary line of what we catalog as a variable star relative to other stars. But really, to you, everybody's got action.

[Connie Aerts]

Well, we're measuring the action up to parts per million.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, there it is.

[Connie Aerts]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You got it.

[Connie Aerts]

Parts per million.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You got it. Okay, Matt, let's get one more slip one more in before we got a call.

[Strayer University Ad Voice]

All right.

[Matt Kirschen]

Margaret Defoe from Milwaukee says, why didn't our solar system go binary? And what is the smallest and largest a star can get? So we're on more general questions about stars, I think.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, let's hold aside the largest and smallest. That's a whole other astrophysics question. But Connie, what do you say about why the sun is alone when so many stars in the night sky are binary in multiple systems?

[Connie Aerts]

Yeah. Well, if you look at a star with the mass of the sun, then half of them are in binary, so that means that half of them are alone. So it's a toss. It's an equal toss, right? Yeah. So that's not so exceptional. But if you go to stars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's not the answer we were looking for. We wanted you to say we might have had a double and then it blew up. We want a more sci fi answer here.

[Matt Kirschen]

It was originally a twin. We lost one of them. It ate the other one in the womb.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ate the other one?

[Connie Aerts]

I don't think so. I don't think so. But that happens frequently when you go to higher masses. If your star is born with 10 to 100 times more mass than the sun was born with, well then about 80% of the stars are multiples, double stars. So for the sun, I think it's just a logical consequence of there only being half of them that live their life together.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, all right.

[Connie Aerts]

Luckily for us, it wouldn't have been so nice here if it would have had been living next to a star that has exploded already.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it has issues, but that's definitely a yet to be written sci fi drama, I think. Sci fi action film. Whatever happened to the sun's twin? You got it. Well, Connie, it's been a delight to have you on startalk. And like I said, my city, my town is your town. So I'm a native of New York City. You're visiting for the sabbatical. Maybe we can get you up to the museum and give you a tour and possibly extract extort a seminar from you for our Astrophysics group.

[Connie Aerts]

I love this city so I'm very grateful that you are hosting me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excellent, Excellent. Matt, Always good to have you, man.

[Matt Kirschen]

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me and this has been great. I've loved hearing about this stuff.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We gotta land this plane. So thanks for joining us on this episode of StarTalk. Cosmic Queries Starquakes. I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson as always bidding you to keep looking up.

[Matt Kirschen]

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