A map of the pulsating red giants in the Milky Way created thanks to the TESS space telescope
An article accepted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of a total of 158,505 pulsating red giants. A team of researchers used the map of most of the sky created thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope and, taking advantage of the quality of those observations, identified an unprecedented amount of this type of stars. The map analysis was conducted using a machine learning system trained to detect the traces of the oscillations in the stellar spectra of red giants. This is a very useful result for the studies of astroseismology, a branch of astronomy that studies the structure and properties of stars by analyzing their pulsations. Marc Hon of the University of Hawaii presented the results at the second TESS Science Conference, held virtually in recent days.
