Conny Aerts

Oh, well, you know, all planets will have quakes.

I mean, any body in nature quakes.

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 then pile 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.

That's true.

Of course, you're creating sound waves.

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

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.

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?

Yeah, as soon as the density changes, for whatever reason, density changes give pressure waves and these are sound waves.

Oh, we have the slowest quake in a star.