Scientists Discover Tsunami-Like 'Starquakes' In Milky Way

Scientists have discovered that stars (or planets) in the galaxy experience "starquakes" that ripple through their surfaces like tsunamis on Earth. The discovery has been made by European Space Agency's (ESA's) Milky Way-mapping Gaia mission.

These starquakes are so powerful that they can even change the shape of a star, ESA said.

The phenomenon was discovered based on data of nearly two billion stars collected by the Gaia space observatory. "Previously, Gaia already found radial oscillations that cause stars to swell and shrink periodically, while keeping their spherical shape. But Gaia has now also spotted other vibrations that are more like large-scale tsunamis," the agency said in a statement.

The observations will allow astronomers to reconstruct our galaxy's structure and find out how it has evolved over billions of years.

The ESA has posted a long Twitter thread on Gaia mission's official Twitter handle, in which it has posted details of chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses and ages based on spectroscopy as captured by latest observations.

With #GaiaDR3 comes the release of 220 million BP/RP spectra, giving insight in the colour of a star and much more. See below for example the effect of temperature on the spectra: https://t.co/QaRY1vd6BB pic.twitter.com/goD8IzH08d

— ESA Gaia (@ESAGaia) June 13, 2022

"Starquakes teach us a lot about stars - notably, their internal workings," Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration, told The Guardian. "Gaia is opening a goldmine for asteroseismology of massive stars."

Gaia has been tasked with making the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way by surveying more than a thousand million stars. It is fitted with a 1 billion pixel camera - the largest ever in space - and more than 100 electronic detectors.

The robotic spacecraft was launched in 2013 and is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets and brown dwarfs, and observe hundreds of thousands of asteroids within the solar system.