Join Conny Aerts, winner of the 2022 Kavli Prize in astrophysics and professor of physics and astronomy at KU Leuven, as she teaches about the emerging field of asteroseismology: the study of oscillations in the matter that makes up a star. Learn about the life cycles of stars, the internal motion of sun-like and massive stars, exoplanets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
- Space & The Cosmos
- Physics & Math
Starquakes and Exoplanets
Conny Aerts
Professor Aerts has spent most of her career researching the structure and evolution of stars — especially the heaviest and brightest ones — pioneering studies in 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.