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It’s often how the best scientific discoveries start: When a scientist says, “Well, that’s weird.”

That was pretty much Steve Kawaler’s reaction when he saw data from Kepler-56, one of dozens of stars NASA’s Kepler space telescope flagged as likely to have orbiting planets, known as exoplanets.

Kawaler, an Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy, is part of a committee overseeing Kepler’s asteroseismic (no, that’s not a typo) research. Asteroseismology is a lot like Earth-bound seismology, Kawaler says. “It’s the same mathematics, the same physics” describing wave propagation and response to conditions like pressure.

But with stars 3,000 light-years away, as Kepler-56 is, scientists can’t plant monitors on the surface to detect and measure waves, like they do here. Instead, astronomers watch for subtle oscillations in light from the star. The frequency and magnitude of those oscillations, combined with readings from instruments like spectrometers, can tell astronomers a lot, including the radius, mass and age of a star and how fast it rotates.

Asteroseismology and other data seemed to tell Kawaler and others in an international team something about Kepler-56 and its planets that they had never seen before.

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