For the past two decades it has been possible to measure the seismic activity of stars with high precision. This is thanks to dedicated telescopes operating from space. Using these recorded ‘songs of the stars’, asteroseismologists can gaze into stellar interiors. By doing this, it is possible to probe the physical conditions and chemical composition of these hot balls of gas millions of light years away.
Asteroseismology is a unique and powerful tool to determine the size, mass, and age of stars to a higher precision than ever before. It also offers a way to better understand the fastest rotators in the Universe on their way to supernova explosions and gravitational waves. Using the insights gained, astrophycists are able to perform archaeology in our Milky Way galaxy, and to characterise exoplanets. In this talk, 2022 Kavli and 2024 Crafoord Laureate Conny Aerts will explain how to use the songs of the stars to unravel their stories and to see the invisible.
Conny Aerts graduated as a mathematician from Antwerp University (1988) and defended her PhD thesis in astrophysics at KU Leuven (1993). Competitive personal grants allowed her to work as independent postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (1994 – 2001), performing numerous stays in Europe, Chile and the USA . She was appointed as Lecturer (2001), Associate Professor (2004), and Full professor (2007) at KU Leuven. She also leads the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen (NL, 2004+) and is External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society (Heidelberg, 2019+).
Conny’s research covers stellar astrophysics, including stellar structure & evolution and variable stars. She is a pioneer of asteroseismology, which received a major boost thanks to the CoRoT (2006+), Kepler (2009+), and TESS (2018+) space missions. Prior to high-precision space photometry, Conny developed rigorous mathematical methods to detect and identify non-radial stellar oscillations in high-resolution time-series spectroscopy. Her team also designed and applied statistical classification methods in a machine-learning context, discoving numerous gravity-mode pulsators in space photometry. As Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Conny introduced herself into the topic of subdwarf stars, their binarity and pulsations, with current focus on development and exploitation of BlackGEM in tandem with gravitational wave studies.
In 2008, Conny was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, PROSPERITY to exploit CoRoT and Kepler space photometry. Her PhD students made major contributions, such as the discovery of non-radial pulsation modes, of dipole mixed modes, and of non-rigid rotation in red giants, following her own detections of internal mixing and rotation in massive stars. The ERC offered her a 2nd AdG, MAMSIE (Mixing and Angular Momentum tranSport in massIvE Stars, 2016-2021) to bridge stellar physics, asteroseismology, and 3D simulations in order to quantify limitations in stellar evolution theory. This culminated in the 2012 Francqui Prize and the 2020 5-year FWO Excellence Award, also termed Belgian and Flemish Nobel Prizes, where Conny was the first woman to receive these prestigious awards in Science & Technology since their creation in 1933 and 1960, respectively. Conny is the recipient of the 2022 Kavli prize in Astrophysics and the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy; she acts as corresponding Principle Investigator of the 2022 ERC Synergy grant 4D-STAR.