Shedding a new light on outstanding problems in stellar physics with ultra-precise space-based photometry

CEECIND/02619/2017
Coordination:

Principal Investigator: Margarida Cunha

Funding:

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

The last decade has witnessed a dramatic advance in stellar physics research driven by exquisite space-based seismic data now available for thousands of stars. This number will increase by orders of magnitude following the launch of NASA’s TESS (2018) and ESA’s PLATO (launch in 2026). Over the next decade, research in asteroseismology will thus be dominated by three important activities: (i) the comprehensive analysis of Kepler 4-year-long photometric time series, which will remain the longest for decades; (ii) the exploitation of the TESS asteroseismic survey; and (iii) the preparatory work for PLATO. This project focuses on key contributions to these three activities with the aim of furthering our understanding of some of the major unknowns in stellar evolution theory.