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I came across an article on Scientific American about variable pulsars whose frequencies vary according to the Golden Ratio. I figured I'd post it here.
Here's a quick tutorial on the Golden Ratio if you're curious
Strange Stars Pulsate According to the "Golden Ratio"
Scholars have seen the golden ratio in nautilus shells, the Parthenon, da Vinci paintings and now in stars. A new study of variable stars observed by the Kepler space telescope found four stars that pulsate at frequencies whose ratio is near the irrational number 0.61803398875, known as the Greek letter phi, or the golden ratio (which is also sometimes referred to as the inverse of that number, 1.61803398875…). The golden ratio had not turned up in the celestial sphere before astronomer John Linder of The College of Wooster in Ohio and his colleagues analyzed the Kepler data.
The researchers looked at a class of stars called RR Lyrae that are known for their variability. Unlike the sun, which shines at a near constant brightness (a good thing for life on Earth!), these stars brighten and dim as their atmospheres expand and contract due to periodic pressure changes. Each star pulses with a primary frequency and also shows smaller brightness fluctuations occurring on a secondary frequency. The ratios between these two frequencies "are very important," says astronomer Róbert Szabó of the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary, who was not involved in the study, "because they are characterized by the inner structure of stars-and if a star exhibits many modes, then observation of the frequencies gives very strict constraints to stellar models." For four of the six RR Lyrae stars the researchers analyzed, the ratio of the primary to secondary frequencies was near the golden mean-within 2 percent of its value in the case of the star KIC 5520878, for example.
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