The field of asteroseismology has grown explosively in the past two decades. It has evolved from bespoke examination of individual variable stars, to now having become both our main means of constraining stellar properties at large scale, and our sole observational probe into the astrophysics of their interiors. I will lay out recent developments of its observational methods and discoveries, particularly from NASA's highly successful Kepler space photometry mission. This recent history repeatedly demonstrates that the development of analytic theory, and of computational technique, is often the rate-determining bottleneck in our ability to derive astrophysical interpretation from observational data.
Each application of new methodology has often immediately unlocked zeroth-order discoveries of new astrophysical phenomena. My research program delivers precisely such advances in theory and technique, and applies them to analyse large data sets. These advances will be critical to keep pace with the ongoing data deluge from NASA's TESS mission — which will only intensify with the imminent launches of NASA's Roman and ESA's PLATO satellites — and to unlock the full scientific potential of the planned Earth 2.0 Telescope. I submit that these advances will be necessary to leverage this coming explosion of new data into a second asteroseismic revolution. I finally outline some open problems in our understanding of stellar astrophysics, which my group will take leadership in approaching by way of this coming flood of observational asteroseismology.
BIO
Dr. Joel ONG is a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on making new advances in the analytic theory of stellar oscillations, and confronting them against observational data sets, through the development of new computational and statistical methodology, to answer fundamental questions about both stellar astrophysics and the star-planet connection. Dr. Ong received his BSc in Physics from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Yale University in 2022.
