Massive stars die in catastrophic explosions, which seed the interstellar
medium with heavy elements and produce neutron stars and black holes.
Predictions of the explosion's character and the remnant mass depend on models
of the star's evolutionary history. Models of massive star interiors can be
empirically constrained by asteroseismic observations of gravity wave
oscillations. Recent photometric observations reveal a ubiquitous red noise
signal on massive main sequence stars; a hypothesized source of this noise is
gravity waves driven by core convection. We present the first 3D simulations of
massive star convection extending from the star's center to near its surface,
with realistic stellar luminosities. Using these simulations, we make the first
prediction of photometric variability due to convectively-driven gravity waves
at the surfaces of massive stars, and find that gravity waves produce
photometric variability of a lower amplitude and lower characteristic frequency
than the observed red noise. We infer that the photometric signal of gravity
waves excited by core convection is below the noise limit of current
observations, so the red noise must be generated by an alternative process.Comment: As accepted for publication in Nature Astronomy except for final
editorial revisions. Supplemental materials available online at
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7764997 . We have also sonified our results to
make them more accessible, see
https://github.com/evanhanders/gmode_variability_paper/blob/main/sound/gmode_sonification.pd