Golden ratio in strange stars...

What's all this then? Just coincidence, or something deep?



http://ift.tt/1M9kwpY

Quote:

Although the sample of stars in this study was very small, the researchers noticed an intriguing pattern among the four stars with pulsation frequencies close to the golden ratio. These stars all exhibited fractal behavior—never-ending patterns that repeat on continuously smaller scales—whereas the two non–golden ratio stars did not. “That suggests there might be a pattern,” Linder says. “What we need is more data.” An example of a fractal is a jagged coastline, which reveals more and more wiggles in its outline as you zoom in from any vantage point. “It’s the same with the frequencies in these stars,” Linder says. “As we lower the threshold we see more and more frequencies.” The golden stars are actually the first examples outside of a laboratory of what’s called “strange nonchaotic dynamics.” The “strange” here refers to a fractal pattern, and nonchaotic means the pattern is orderly, rather than random. Most fractal patterns in nature, such as weather, are chaotic, so this aspect of the variable stars came as a surprise. “If you look in the literature, you see lots of examples of strange chaotic behavior,” Linder says. “I think our paper is going to bring this overlooked type of dynamics to the foreground.” If the same pattern is seen in more stars with golden ratio frequencies, it might help astronomers better understand and predict the detailed physics of stellar pulsations. “From a dynamics perspective,” Livio says, “it is quite intriguing to understand why systems would be attracted to this ratio.”

Any ideas from the Astronomy types here?



ETA: The paper is here: http://ift.tt/1xXcIjQ

Quote:

Strange nonchaotic stars John F. Lindner, Vivek Kohar, Behnam Kia, Michael Hippke, John G. Learned, William L. Ditto (Submitted on 8 Jan 2015 (v1), last revised 4 Feb 2015 (this version, v2)) The unprecedented light curves of the Kepler space telescope document how the brightness of some stars pulsates at primary and secondary frequencies whose ratios are near the golden mean, the most irrational number. A nonlinear dynamical system driven by an irrational ratio of frequencies generically exhibits a strange but nonchaotic attractor. For Kepler's "golden" stars, we present evidence of the first observation of strange nonchaotic dynamics in nature outside the laboratory. This discovery could aid the classification and detailed modeling of variable stars.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1M9lmTH