Nicholas Rui - Three Minute Thesis - 4/25/2023

picture a bell at the top of a far away Bell Tower now just by looking at the Bell you can learn certain things about it already like it's a shape or its color and that might tell you certain things like what it's made of and Heck if you were clever and you even knew how far away the Bell was you might even be able to figure

but also its deep interior which was something which was before just totally invisible the idea of Astro seismology is pretty much exactly like that listening to Bells we're listening to Stars one of my favorite kinds of stars to listen to is the red giant a puffy dying star with a dense helium coordinate Center red giants have unending star Quakes owing to constant stirring and ringing by

convection in their outer layers and by monitoring the changes and brightnesses of these Stars we can listen in on those star Quakes appear underneath the surfaces of the stars and measure the masses of this helium cores I'm going to oversimplify a little bit but essentially more more massive stars will make and have more massive cores now that kind of makes sense and so indeed when we

go and look at them more uh red giants tend to have the cores with about the masses that we expect but every once in a while you stumble upon a red giant whose core is just a little bit too lights it'd be like wandering into a bell Factory and finding a single solid Bell in a pile of hollow ones now you might not know why this

spell is different but you know that it is and that it was probably made differently somehow and in the case of Star as well an under massive core rather suggests that the star was less massive when it made that chord than it is now today that means it had to pick up that mass somehow and so we've discovered using asteroid seismology by listening a way to

tell even potentially millions of years after the fact that a star participated in a violent Stellar merger event that is only one of the many problems about with Astro seismology has something to say you know we astronomers we care so much about looking we build these gigantic telescopes for billions and billions of dollars we even shoot them into space just so we can look at stuff

harder but Astro seismology teaches us that there is a heck of a lot more we can learn about the Stars by listening thank you [Applause]