Science & Cocktails: Looking Deep Inside Stars

Conny Aerts

Science & Cocktails is proud to present an episode with the world-renowned "starquake professor", starring 2022 Kavli Laureate in Astrophysics Conny Aerts. She is professor at KU Leuven and at Radboud University Nijmegen, and is also an External Member of the Max Planck Society at Heidelberg. Conny Aerts is able to observe the un-observable. She succeeds to do so with waves created by stellar oscillations, sometimes nicknamed starquakes.

What is a starquake? Is it similar to an Earthquake? Why can we see inside stars with the help of starquakes and what do we actually see? Or should we rather say hear... Conny Aerts will take you to the land of stellar oscillations and guide you through the forces of nature governing that land. She will illustrate how the detection and interpretation of stellar oscillations allow us to unravel the internal physics and chemistry of stars. She will also explain how starquakes deliver us a unique fantastic tool to determine how old the stars in our Milky Way are, including our own host, the Sun.

This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support of the University of Amsterdam. Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso Amsterdam.