The findings appear in the journal, Science Advances.
Surface gravity is the intensity of the force that pulls everything on the surface of a star or celestial body towards the centre.
It is usually calculated by measuring a star's light or brightness - but this only works well for the closest, brightest stars.
A team led by Thomas Kallinger of the University of Vienna used data from the Kepler space telescope - which is searching for other worlds like the Earth - to show that variations in the brightness of distant stars can give more accurate measurements of surface gravity.