This program will highlight the research and accomplishments of Conny Aerts, a pioneer in Asteroseismology. Professor Aerts revolutionized the study of starquakes, bringing an entirely new way to learn about the stars. She will discuss how starquakes allow us to size, weigh, and age-date stars with unprecedented and impressive precision. Asteroseismology of host stars is the only way to determine the ages of exoplanets. Thus, asteroseismology and the search for habitable worlds outside our solar system, and perhaps even extraterrestrial life in the Universe, go hand-in-hand.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Conny Aerts is a professor in astrophysics at the University of Leuven's Institute of Astronomy. She has carried out a wide range of research on the structure and evolution of stars, especially the heaviest and brightest ones, including studies of stellar rotation, convection, and chemical-element transport. She has developed mathematical methods to identify non-radial stellar oscillations in spectroscopic data, and used machine-learning techniques to classify many kinds of variable stars using observations from the CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS space missions. Among these objects she has detected numerous so-called gravity-mode pulsators. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Antwerp University and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Leuven.