Join us for the 2026 Stibbs Lecture - Deciphering the Music of the Stars: Asteroseismology, presented by renowned astrophysicist Professor Conny Aerts.
Prepare to listen to the music of the stars – and to see them in a whole new way!
The life of stars is directed by the physical processes happening deep inside them. In this Stibbs Lecture, Professor Conny Aerts will explain how asteroseismologists peer beyond the external layers of these gaseous rotating hot balls of fire to decode the tiny stellar vibrations within.
While enjoying some stellar music, the audience will become familiar with these extraterrestrial vibrations and gain insight into how asteroseismologists measure the sizes, masses and ages of stars.
The second part of the lecture will focus on internal stellar rotation, magnetism and tides. Professor Aerts will then look to the future of asteroseismology, highlighting the exciting questions and discoveries driving this vibrant and rapidly evolving field.
| Date: | Thursday 12 February 2026 |
| Time: | 5:45 pm for 6-7:15 pm |
| Venue: | Susan Wakil Health Building, Lecture Theatre 321, Western Ave, Camperdown, The University of Sydney |
| Registration: | Free, registration essential |
Conny Aerts graduated as a mathematician from Belgium's University of Antwerp (1988) and defended her PhD thesis in astrophysics at KU Leuven (1993). Competitive grants subsqequently allowed her to work as an independent Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (1994-2001), after which she was appointed as Lecturer (2001), Associate Professor (2004), and full Professor (2007) at KU Leuven in Belgium. Since 2004, she has also led the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, and since 2019 she has been the External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society in Heidelberg, Germany.
Conny is a pioneer of asteroseismology - a field that received a major boost thanks to the CoRoT, Kepler and TESS space missions - and she has developed rigorous mathematical methods to detect and interpret tiny stellar oscillations in all sorts of stars. Over the past two decades, her team has designed and applied statistical methods in a machine-learning context and discovered numerous gravity-mode pulsators in space photometry.
Conny was the first women to be awarded the Belgian Francqui Prize (2012) and the 5-year FWO Excellence Award (2020) in Science and Technology. She is also the recipient of the international Kavli Prize in Astrophysics (2022) and the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy (2024). Conny is heavily involved in the ESA space mission PLATO and leads two major international initiatives in single and binary star research funded by the European Research Council and the Flemish government.
Main image: The Pleiades (M45), or "Seven Sisters," background with illustration of the interiors of stars.
The Professor Walter Stibbs Lectureship commemorates the achievements of Professor Stibbs through an annual lecture by a distinguished astronomer of international standing.
