Physics Colloquium: Sounding stars while hunting for planets with the Kepler, K2, and TESS spacecraft

By awakening us to the amazing abundance of other planetary systems, the Kepler mission has been a landmark in advancing our understanding of the Universe. The basis for these discoveries is extremely accurate brightness measurements of over 100,000 stars, simultaneously and continuously over several years, to search for dips in a star’s light when and if on of its planets crosses the star’s face. These photometric time series also enable us to probe the subtle vibrations of the stars themselves – star quakes – that can reveal their internal structure via a technique known as asteroseismology. Through asteroseismology we can accurately measure the masses, ages, and radii of the stars – properties that are needed to specify the dimensions of their planets. In addition, though the data corresponding to planetary transit events is far less than 0.1% of the total amount of data obtained, the remaining >99.9% of the data is an exquisite record of the behavior of an enormous variety of stars. In this talk I’ll discuss the contributions that asteroseismology has been able to make to exoplanet and stellar studies using the remarkable archive of Kepler photometry, the ongoing efforts of the follow-on K2 mission, and plans for future missions such as TESS.