{"id":31475,"date":"2015-02-05T15:36:09","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T01:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=31475"},"modified":"2021-10-06T13:29:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-06T23:29:29","slug":"physicists-find-fractal-patterns-in-pulsating-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2015\/02\/05\/physicists-find-fractal-patterns-in-pulsating-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicists find fractal patterns in pulsating stars"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> &lt; 1<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minute<\/span><\/span><p><a href=\"http:\/\/manoa.hawaii.edu\/\">University of <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Hawai&#699;i<\/span> at M&#257;noa<\/a> physicists are part of a team that reports the first evidence of fractal features in the details of stellar pulsations. The paper titled <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1501.01747\">&ldquo;Strange nonchaotic stars&rdquo;<\/a> was published this week in <a href=\"http:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/PhysRevLett.114.054101\"><em>Physical Review Letters<\/em><\/a>, the flagship journal of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aps.org\/\">American Physical Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If confirmed, the fractal characteristics could aid the classification and detailed modeling of these variable stars. Fractals are never-ending patterns that are self-similar no matter how large or small the scale.<\/p>\n<p>The research resulted from a casual conversation between <strong>John Learned<\/strong>, a <abbr>东精影业<\/abbr> M&#257;noa particle physics professor, and <strong>William Ditto<\/strong>, physics professor and dean of the College of Natural Sciences, at the start of College of Wooster Professor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wooster.edu\/bios\/jlindner\/\">John Lindner<\/a>&#8217;s yearlong sabbatical.<\/p>\n<p>Learned was part of a group using Kepler space telescope data to study a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, which pulsates at multiple frequencies.<\/p>\n<p>Ditto was intrigued that two of the frequencies were nearly in the golden ratio. &ldquo;From prior work I suspected that a fractal structure known as a strange nonchaotic attractor might guide the dynamics,&rdquo; he recalls. Such attractors had previously been observed in the laboratory but never before in the wild.<\/p>\n<p>Fractal self-similarity can describe processes in time as well as patterns in space, and a music analogy elucidates the team&#8217;s analysis of the variable starlight. &ldquo;We removed the musical backbeat to discover a subtle melody,&rdquo; Lindner explains.<\/p>\n<p>The Kepler telescope was collecting data on the star as one of 150,000 other stars in a small portion of space for almost four years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><abbr>东精影业<\/abbr> M\u0101noa physicists are part of a team that reports the first evidence of fractal features in the details of stellar pulsations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34,124,9],"class_list":["post-31475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-astronomy","tag-physics","tag-uh-manoa","entry","no-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31475"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149307,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31475\/revisions\/149307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}