Seismology of the Stars
Professor Conny Aerts’ team from the Department of Astronomy carries out seismological research of the stars. “By examining a star’s oscillations, we discover more about its core and it is the core of a star that actually directs its entire life. The stars, in their turn, direct life in the universe. We have been using this method since 2001, when we discovered that the oscillations we can see in the sun appear in other stars too. Previously, our technologies were simply not good enough to measure the oscillations.”
“We are interested in heavy stars because they will explode as supernovas and in giant red stars because our sun will become a red giant too. The sun is five billion years old now, so it has reached the middle of its life approximately. If we collect information about other red giants, it will be much easier to predict when exactly the sun will die and become a red giant.”
“Until recently, we did not even know if there were oscillations in red giants. Thanks to the European CoRoT satellite, we can analyse information about hundreds of stars. The NASA Kepler satellite was launched at the beginning of March. It will collect similar information about approximately one thousand stars.”
Leuven’s asteroseismology team is part of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC), which is composed of more than 200 researchers from 50 institutes. The consortium will endeavour to discover new properties of stellar cores with unprecedented precision from the data that has been collected. Aerts: “We will have to be patient though. It will take five years for the information to be ready for analysis.” (tb)
