Lecturer: Prof. Lars Bildsten
Affiliation:
The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract:
Long-term and sensitive space-based
photometry from the Kepler and CoRoT
satellites has allowed us to finally 'hear' the
stars. These remarkable data have yielded
accurate measurements of masses, radii and
distances for more than 10,000 stars across the
Milky Way. More profoundly, these
observations are revealing the interior
conditions of the star, clearly differentiating
those that are undergoing helium burning in
their cores to those that are only burning
hydrogen in a shell. Moreover, interior rotation
rates for thousands of post-main sequence stars
will soon be known, probing the uncertain
physics of angular momentum transport that is
important to the progenitors of core collapse
supernova.