Hey, it’s another new paper from our UW Massive Stars research group! This one was led by Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, one of our UW grad students (entering the final year of his PhD!) and builds on his previous work studying short-term variability of evolved massive stars with TESS. In this paper Trevor reports the discovery of a new class (!) of fast-pulsating yellow supergiants, or FYPS (yes, the acronym is out of order. hey, it’s easier to see, and in the grand scheme of tortured astronomy acronyms FYPS are nowhere near the worst offenders!) Trevor also found that all of the stars in this sample show stochastic low-frequency variability; this has been previously found in hot massive stars and explained by internal gravity waves, but finding them in cool evolved stars is really interesting. This work is the latest installment in Trevor’s thesis work studying massive stars across a broad range of scales and with a broad range of techniques, and finding weird new variables among evolved massive stars is an unexpected but exciting find!

The paper is in press with the Astrophysical Journal; for now you can check it out on arXiv!