CANADA: We all know that like living beings, stars are also born and they die. But do you know they also have heartbeat? According to astronomers, they succeeded in detecting many stellar pulses in the galaxy Messier 87, which is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. They used a novel technique to take measurements. It could be a new way to find the age of a galaxy.
When stars get old, they undergo significant change. They become very bright and big. When these stars reach the end of their lifetime, they start pulsating. Charlie Conroy, an astronomer from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and assistant professor at Harvard University, said, “We realized that these stars are so bright and their pulsations so strong, that they are difficult to hide. We decided to see if the pulsations of these stars could be detected even if their light couldn’t separate from the sea of unchanging neighbor stars.”
The astronomers observed one of the most massive galaxies in the local universe, Messier 87. They analyzed some pictured taken by NASA’s the Hubble Space Telescope. Pieter van Dokkum from the Yale University said the astronomers sooner found what they were looking for. They observed that one in four pixels in the picture changed with time.
According to Conroy, after analyzing data from the Hubble telescope, it was found that the average pixel changes in about 270 days. The regular change in brightness suggests there is a heartbeat, Conroy said.
