When Stars Twinkle, They Make Music

With enough determination, people can turn almost anything into a musical instrument: a blade of grass, an array of water glasses, a field of flowing sand dunes in Abu Dhabi, or a 3.5-acre system of stalactites dangling from the ceiling of Virginia’s Luray Caverns. But why stop there? Evan Anders, a fluid dynamics researcher at Northwestern University, and his colleagues just transformed an entire star into a musical instrument.

The researchers’ formal goal was to vibrate a star and listen: a passage from Gustav Holst’s and (natch) a snippet of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”