Despite the efforts of our friends Gene and George, the vacuum in space prevents the propagation of sound. However, a group of astrophysicists at the University of Birmingham used data from the Kepler mission to measure the "acoustic oscillations" in some of the oldest stars in the galaxy, located in the globular cluster M4. In other words, it is the "song" of stellar grandmothers more than twelve billion years old.
We all know that the promotional tagline for the movie Alien was "in space, no one can hear you scream". Besides adding an extra touch of terror to the viewer's mind, the detail is that it is a technically correct phrase. Following that technical line, we could add that space is not a perfect vacuum, however, it is very, very close to being one. Take the Sun as an example. More than once the question has arisen: "How loud would the Sun be?" The most conservative calculations talk about 100 decibels... something impressive coming from a "speaker" that is 150 million kilometers away. If it weren't for the fact that it would kill us mercilessly, I think we should be grateful for the vacuum, but not even that is enough to prevent us from listening to the stars' "songs".
That is exactly what a group of astrophysicists at the University of Birmingham did, through a series of data obtained with the help of the Kepler mission. The data allow us to study the resonant oscillations of stars by applying a technique called "asteroseismology" (or "stellar seismology," if you prefer). These oscillations cause tiny changes, "pulses of light" linked to sound trapped in stars. The technique not only lets us know stars in a way we might never have imagined, but also helps us obtain very specific parameters about them, such as their age and mass.
In the link at the end of this article you can listen to the oscillations of four stars in the globular cluster M4, a "neighbor" 7,200 light-years away. These stars are old, true grandmothers with more than 12.2 billion years of age. Our own Sun (4.5 billion years), which is essentially halfway through its stable life, would be almost a teenager compared to these ancient "luminaries".
