Have you ever wondered what those bright spots in the nighttime sky really are? Many of us assume they’re all stars, but did you know that some of those spots are actually planets, or distant suns, or even entire galaxies located billions of light years away? The exact identity of what you’re seeing depends on how far it is from Earth. This is why measuring the exact distance to celestial objects is such a critical goal for astronomers — and one of the biggest challenges they’re currently tackling.
With this in mind, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Gaia mission a decade ago in a quest for answers. The data collected by the Gaia satellite are opening up a window into the near Universe, providing astronomical measurements — such as position, distance from the Earth and movement — on nearly two billion stars.
At EPFL, the Standard Candles and Distances research group, headed by Prof. Richard Anderson, aims to measure the current expansion of the Universe and sees Gaia as a valuable tool. “Gaia increased by a factor of 10,000 the number of stars whose parallaxes are measured thanks to a massive gain in accuracy over its predecessor, the ESA Hipparcos mission,” he explains. Today, scientists use parallaxes to calculate the distance to stars. This method involves measuring parallax angles, with the help of the satellite, through a form of triangulation between Gaia’s location in space, the Sun and the star in question. The farther away a star, the more difficult the measurement because parallax gets smaller the larger the distance.
Even with the resounding success of Gaia, the measurement of parallax is complex, and there remain small systematic effects that must be checked and corrected in order for Gaia parallaxes to reach their full potential. This is what scientists from EPFL and the University of Bologna, in Italy, have been working on, through calculations performed on over 12,000 oscillating red giant stars* — the biggest sample size and most accurate measurements to date.
“We measured the Gaia biases by comparing the parallaxes reported by the satellite with parallaxes of the same stars that we determined using asteroseismology,” says Saniya Khan, a scientist in Anderson’s research group and the lead author of a study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Stellar earthquakes
In much the same way that geologists study the Earth’s structure using earthquakes, astronomers use asteroseismology, and specifically stars’ vibrations and oscillations, to glean information about their physical properties. Stellar oscillations are measured as tiny variations in light intensity and translated into sound waves, giving rise to a frequency spectrum of these oscillations.
“The frequency spectrum lets us determine how far away a star is, enabling us to obtain asteroseismic parallaxes,” says Khan. “In our study, we listened to the ‘music’ of a vast number of stars — some of them 15,000 light-years away!”
To turn sounds into distance measurements, the research team started with a simple fact. The speed with which sound waves propagate across space depends on the temperature and density of the star’s interior.
