Ok, I thought, I’m an astro writer, I got this. For one thing, you wouldn’t use astroseismology to look at the pulses of a pulsating white dwarf: pulses are relatively long, astroseismology looks for little jitters. For another, AG spelled it “asteroseismology,” laughably wrong. After further investigation, the astro writer learns a lesson: never second-guess AG.
Abstruse Goose had a couple sneaky messages always. One is a floating caption-thing, the other is the name of the download. The name of this download was: Dramatic Re-enactment of Actual Study on BPM-37093. Googled BPM-37093. It’s an all-but-dead star, out of fuel, gravitationally-collapsed so hard down to carbon that it’s essentially a diamond. So without further googling, I give up and assume that diamond stars would sort of ring, not pulse in and out, and so astroseismology would be useful. I may be making this up. What I’m not making up is, 1) with googling, I learn that astroseismology’s jitters come in all sizes; and 2), for chrissakes, “asteroseismology” really is the correct spelling. I haven’t a clue why.
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Astro= Latin, seismology=Greek. Astero = Greek, so it’s asteroseimology to be internally consistent.
Luisa, an astronomer in Denmark and on Twitter told me to read this. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996Obs…116..313G And now, Douglas Gough, whoever you are, I’m seriously in love.
In ancient Greek “ástron” meant “stars” (plural) while “astḗr” meant “star” (singular), so both of your spellings could’ve been equally correct and matched the Greek root of “seismology”. I imagine that since this specialty looks at the seismology of individual stars, that they decided to go with the singular “astḗr”.