Maunakea telescope tunes into music of nearby star, unveils surprising discovery

A team of astronomers led by Yaguang Li, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, has used a Maunakea telescope to listen to the music of a nearby star, uncovering surprises that shake our understanding of how stars work.

The study used a new cutting-edge instrument at the W.M. Keck Observatory called the Keck Planet Finder (KPF)—which detected oscillations rippling through star HD 219134. The team’s findings, published in the “Astrophysical Journal,” open a new window into the interiors of stars that were once thought too quiet to probe.

“The vibrations of a star are like its unique song,” Li said. “By listening to those oscillations, we can precisely determine how massive a star is, how large it is, and how old it is.”

The team gathered over 2,000 ultra-precise measurements across four nights, capturing vibrations that allowed them to calculate the star’s age at 10.2 billion years—making it more than twice as old as the Sun and one of the oldest main-sequence stars studied through this method.

But the star also held a surprise: it appears smaller than expected. While other measurements suggest HD 219134’s radius is about 4% larger, the starquakes revealed a more compact structure, challenging existing stellar models. The star is known to host at least five planets, including two rocky, super-Earth-sized worlds.

“This is like finding a long-lost tuning fork for stellar clocks,” said Li. “It gives us a reference point to calibrate how stars spin down over billions of years.”

Instruments like KPF will enable age measurements for other stars which are slated to become the focus for searching for life on other planets using future NASA missions. “When we find life on another planet, we will want to know how old that life is,” said IfA Astronomer Daniel Huber, a co-author on the study.