Singing Stars: Red Giant Stars Make Music

(Oct. 30) -- What do the stars sound like?

Using data from a NASA probe, astronomers have gotten an answer.

They've discovered that space is ringing with the music produced by red giant stars -- celestial bodies that swell as they near the end of their life cycle.

"It is a red giant concert," said astronomer Daniel Huber of the University of Sydney, Australia, according to The Wall Street Journal. "They have many different frequencies and overtones."

The recording, recently unveiled at a conference in Denmark, shows that bigger stars have a deeper voice than their smaller counterparts.

"Just as it's easy to hear the difference between a note played on a cello and a violin, larger stars naturally flicker in lower tones, while smaller stars flicker in higher tones," Travis Metcalfe, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told Voice of America.

Stars produce sound through earthquake-like oscillations on their surface. These oscillations travel into the core of the star and back out again, making the star's light flicker.

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Using information from NASA's Kepler probe, the astronomers were able to turn this flickering into astral music.

"Kepler is literally listening to thousands of red giant musicians in the sky," Huber said, according to Discovery News.

The sounds aren't just for music-lovers. Scientists studying the recording's tones are better able to determine how big the star is, its distance from Earth and its age.

"We can use these oscillation periods to study the cores of stars," said Hans Kjeldsen of Aarhus University in Denmark. "In a way, we use this to touch the stars."

Red giants are old stars, some of them hundreds of times the size of our own sun. As the stars grow, they cool, eventually turning from white or yellow to red.

Our sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years.