A team of astronomers has discovered red stars with heartbeats in Messier 87 and made use of it to determine the galaxy's age.

Messier 87 is a giant elliptical galaxy that is located some 53 million light years from planet Earth in the constellation Virgo.

Astronomer Prof. Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University explained in a news release that galaxies are steady beacons in the sky but seeing them shimmering due to all the giant, pulsating stars in them is amazing. He is also the co-author of the published paper in the Journal Nature.

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Stars, just like our Sun, undergo significant changes later in life. They brighten and achieve huge sizes that any planets within their radius like Earth can be absorbed. They pulsate near the end of their lifetime, either increasing or decreasing their brightness every few hundred days.

The effects of these stars on the light from more distant galaxies have not been considered. The light of each pulsating star is mixed with other stars but does not vary in brightness in distant galaxies.

Co-author Dr. Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics added that stars that are so bright with strong pulsations are difficult to hide.  So the astronomers decided to try to detect the pulsations of these stars without separating their light from neighboring unchanging stars.

The astronomers found what they were looking for when the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope sent images of Messier 87 over the course of three months in 2006. They were able to analyze the Hubble images showing the variation of average pixel on a timescale of approximately 270 days. The regular up and down changes in brightness are reminiscent of a heartbeat.

The variation of the strength and speed of a galaxy's heartbeat determines it age, and this is a new way of measuring the age of a galaxy. Approximately, Messier 87 is now 10 billion years old.

The team's next step is to take the pulse of other galaxies.

Tagsastronomers discover, astronomers discover heartbeats, galaxy with pulse, messier 87, Hubble Space Telescope