Denmark

A collaboration between a group led by Associate Professor Tim Bedding in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney and Dr Hans Kjeldsen, Jorgen Christensen-Dalsgaard and colleagues from the Theoretical Astrophysics Center at Aarhus University in Denmark.

The program was initiated in 1994 and involves measuring oscillations in stars. The frequencies of these oscillations provide information about the internal structures of stars that cannot be obtained in any other way and the technique promises to lead to significant advances in our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. The project initially led to a new method of detecting stellar oscillations by measuring their effect on the temperatures of stars. It also established an empirical scaling law for predicting the amplitudes of stellar oscillations from fundamental stellar parameters. This law is widely used for estimating oscillation amplitudes when evaluating observations and designing experiments. The project has since yielded the first reliable detection of oscillations in a sun-like star (beta Hydri) which was reviewed in the prestigious journal Science under the title "The Birth of Asteroseismology."

More recently, observing time won on the world's largest telescopes under intense peer competition has produced oscillation measurements on three further stars and established this Australian-Danish group as world leaders in the field. Finally, the two groups are jointly leading a satellite mission (MONS), which aims to measure oscillations from space.

The collaboration has been funded in Australia through ARC grants (Discovery Project, SPIRT and Linkage International), and in Denmark through grants from the Danish Research Council and the Danish Small Satellite Programme.