Red Giants Across the Sky

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Produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach in collaboration with NASA’s Universe of Learning partners: Caltech/IPAC, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
 
Video imagery:
  • Red giant stars illustration: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
  • TESS and Gaia data animation: Kristin Riebe, Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
  • TESS sky map gif: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA), M. Hon et al., 2021

Writer: Leah Ramsay
Designer: Leah Hustak 
Science review: Dr. Quyen Hart
Education review: Jim Manning
Music from Music for Non-Profits

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Objects and gases of various colors in outer space. Text, News from the Universe
 
August 18, 2021. Red Giants Across The Sky
 
Astronomers have identified an unprecedented all-sky collection of pulsating red giant stars.
 
The find, made with data from NASA's Tess and ESA's Gaia missions, confirms our fundamental prediction in galactic astronomy:
 
In an animation, different colored fields cover sections of Earth.
 
As the Earth breaks apart, the colors turn into a spray of pixels. Text, Younger, higher-mass stars lie closer to the bright plane of the Milky Way, rather than the diffuse outskirts.
 
At the center of concentric circles.
 
The stars' pulsations, created by internal sound waves, tell scientists accurate details about the stars' size and internal structure.
 
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TESS's broad coverage allow scientists to make these measurements across almost the entire sky.
 
This news was brought to you in part by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD