Pulsating stars as finely tuned instruments in the stellar symphony Dr Dominic Bowman, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University
Event details
School of Physics, Engineering and Technology Lecture
Stars are the building blocks of galaxies in the Universe and are responsible for making most of the chemical elements on the periodic table. Therefore, astronomers want to understand how stars are born, and what happens during and at the ends of their lives. Deep within a star like our own Sun, hydrogen is being converted into helium through nuclear fusion. How long a star lives for depends on how much hydrogen fuel is available. An excellent method to measure the amount of hydrogen fuel in a star is called asteroseismology, which is the study of 'star quakes' and is similar to how geologists probe the interior of the Earth using earthquakes. The energetic and noisy conditions inside a star cause waves that reach the surface causing it to twinkle and shimmer, which asteroseismologists use to measure a star's interior properties. Pulsating stars are commonplace in the Universe each providing a different piece of the cosmic puzzle.
In this public lecture, Dominic provides an introduction to asteroseismology and discuss its application to stars using high-precision data from space telescopes. He pays particular attention to asteroseismology of massive stars, which are much bluer and have more than ten times the mass of the Sun. Massive stars are important factories in the Universe since they provide chemical and energetic feedback to their surroundings through their winds and explosive deaths as supernovae. However, our theoretical models for how massive stars evolve currently contain large uncertainties for key ingredients such as rotation and mixing processes. These unknowns propagate throughout stellar evolution making it difficult to accurately determine a star's mass and age, thus complicating our predictions of supernovae yields. In his talk, he discusses novel constraints on the interior physics of massive stars learned from ongoing space telescope missions.
Another fascinating aspect of studying stars is the prospect of finding exoplanets. Thousands of new planets have been discovered in the last decade using space telescopes, but we still do not know yet if any of these planets have alien life. Learning about other planets also helps us to understand our own solar system, and in particular the Earth. Dominic will conclude his talk with an overview of ongoing and future space missions helping us to better understand the evolution of stars and the exoplanets they may host and are yet to be discovered.
About the speaker
Dr Dominic Bowman was born in the United Kingdom and holds both British and Irish citizenship. He completed his MSci (Hons) Physics and Astrophysics degree at the University of Birmingham (Sept 2009 - July 2013), and obtained his PhD in Astronomy from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (Oct 2013 - Nov 2016), which was funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In February 2017, he moved to Leuven in Belgium to become a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Conny Aerts at the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium (Feb 2017 - Oct 2020). In Novemeber 2020 he obtained a competitive FWO senior postdoctoral research fellowship also based at KU Leuven (Nov 2020 - Aug 2023). Since September 2023, Dominic holds a Readership Faculty position in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University in the UK, where he implements his UKRI Frontier Research Grant: SYMPHONY.