Cosmic Queries – Starquakes with Conny Aerts

51.432 - 58.887 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Yeah, so you solicited questions about stars and starquakes from... I'm very excited about this topic, and so are the listeners.

58.927 - 68.125 Matt Kirshen

There's been a lot of... A lot of your Patreon patrons have responded to this one, and we're going to try and get through as many of these as possible, but I can't promise all of them. I will try.

68.527 - 70.571 Neil deGrasse Tyson

I don't know a damn thing about starquakes.

71.913 - 82.051 Matt Kirshen

Yeah, I know. I'm excited. I live in California where earthquakes are a problem, so I know how to deal with those. But if you're involved in a starquake, is getting under a table still enough? Or how do we deal with it?

82.292 - 112.061 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Yeah, we're going to 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. Hi, glad to be here. 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.

271.023 - 279.754 Neil deGrasse Tyson

So what could possibly be quaking if you don't have anything solid to build up the tension that then gets released?

280.19 - 312.658 Conny 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 objects. holes, concert holes, right?

312.678 - 312.758 Unknown

Wow.

312.958 - 321.847 Conny Aerts

And so the nice thing is that starquakes are always there. Luckily for us humans, the earthquakes die out quickly, right?

322.507 - 334.019 Neil deGrasse Tyson

And they're rare, relatively. 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.

619.327 - 639.991 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.

640.492 - 647.46 Conny Aerts

So Jupiter, Saturn, all the big gaseous planets in our solar system, they also have quakes.

647.44 - 653.829 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Wait a minute, Connie, you're saying every sound anywhere is a quake to you. Yeah. Okay.

654.653 - 655.135 Conny Aerts

That's true.

655.336 - 656.421

You do.

1062.346 - 1073.744 Matt Kirshen

It's going to descend through possibly to... To probably not. And then I'm on Twitter, at Matt Kirshen, and technically on Instagram, but I'm very rarely there.

1073.764 - 1103 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Okay, Kirshen, K-I-R-S-H-E-N. And we have as our in-house expert right now on Starquakes, professor of astro-seismology in the Netherlands. But right now, Connie... 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.

1103.101 - 1133.157 Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

1133.98 - 1135.303 Conny Aerts

Very grateful to be here.

1135.363 - 1162.211 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thank you. 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're now hearing about quakes on completely different time scales.

1450.651 - 1477.146 Conny Aerts

Yes, 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. That's also something you can imagine if you take the analogy with coffee drinkers.

1477.567 - 1499.244 Conny Aerts

If you like coffee with milk, you pour milk into your coffee and you don't wait 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 why do you do that?

1499.264 - 1501.989 Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

1502.009 - 1510.062 Conny Aerts

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

1510.543 - 1515.832 Matt Kirshen

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

1694.021 - 1718.365 Matt Kirshen

Oh, thanks. It's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me. So we've got more questions, Matt. 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 or 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.

1718.345 - 1739.411 Neil deGrasse Tyson

You know, in the formation of stars in the galaxy, you can get shockwaves across a gas cloud that's otherwise mining 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.

1739.431 - 1769.198 Conny Aerts

Yeah, so you can have all sorts of reasons why stars have these oscillations, right? And they can indeed be caused by the fierce turbulence in the core of a very massive star because it's, you know, 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 starquakes.

1769.499 - 1780.449 Conny Aerts

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 forces.

1780.469 - 1794 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Binary star system. Binary star system, yeah. Just like in that scene in Star Wars where Luke comes out, is it the sand planet? And he sees a double sunset. That's the only accurate science in the entire series.