Star pulses become a celestial symphony.

NASA's new video shows the swirling symphony of stars in our cosmic neighborhood.

Although it usually hunts for alien worlds or exoplanets in the nearby universe, one NASA mission is also capable of measuring the vibrations produced by behemoth celestial bodies known as red giant stars.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission launched in April 2018, is dedicated to exoplanet research. The technique he uses to find these worlds is called the transit method, and that is to watch the neighboring stars and wait to see if their brightness decreases. These dives are caused by a planetary body moving ahead of the star's face from our point of view into space.

As TESS is already in the process of observing changes in stars caused by orbiting exoplanets, it has also been able to detect oscillations in the bodies of red giants.

"Our initial result, using stellar measurements across TESS's first two years, shows that we can determine the masses and sizes of these oscillating giants with the precision that will only improve as TESS goes on," said Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, who presented the new research this week during the second TESS Science Conference. Hon commented in an August. 4 NASA's Declaration on New Work.

According to NASA, a star oscillates when the gas it holds heat, rises, then cools and flows. These impulses can be translated into sound waves.

Just as a person may have their eyes closed but still recognize that the sound of two similar types of instruments makes different sounds, like a violin and a cello, astronomers can use these stellar waves to determine the makeup and dimensions of red giants in contrast to other kinds of stars and one another.

This sub-domain of astronomy, called asteroseismology, 'can help determine the fundamental properties of a large number of stars with a precision that cannot be achieved otherwise,' NASA said in the statement.

The team programmed the TESS mission to find something new by teaching a computer, using machine learning, how to make pattern-based decisions. In this case, artificial intelligence has enabled the computer to concentrate on red giant stars in a sample of TESS star data.

When this first step was completed, the researchers plotted the distances of these more than 150,000 red giant stars. Then they turned toward the Gaia mission. Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) telescope, which produces the most detailed image of the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers believe that the large red giants should be seated closer to the plane of the Milky Way. Hon's crew paired their discoveries with Gaia's mission.

"Our map demonstrates for the first time empirically that this is indeed the case across nearly the whole sky," co-author Daniel Huber, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Hawaii, said in the NASA statement. "With Gaia's help, TESS has now offered us tickets to a show of red giants in the sky."

The new work, which appeared on the arXiv.org pre-print server, was accepted for release in The Astrophysical Journal.